Pukytė Paulina Eglė
By the Fountain, 2013, 1 min 30 s
Digital video with sound, footage from 1960‘s home movie, music from Antanas Rekašius Autocollage No 2
Metamorphosis, 2012, animation, 3 min
Animated drawings from a book of beauty advice for women
Satyr, 2009, video 2 min
Scylla, 2009, video with sound, 22 min
Satyr and Scylla form a pair of short videos, that observe a man and a woman. Satyr, a symbol of the male sex drive, appears here as a naked man lying (drunk) on a lawn. While uncannily resembling Satyr’s image from a Greek vase, he has acquired a helpless and very feminine pose. Scylla, a symbol of monstrous female danger for passers-by, here stands at the side of a holiday makers’ path while day turns into night in a dilapidated backstage of a summer resort, luring a few into her dungeon. She is, in fact, hosting a paid public toilet.
A Collection of Flower Postcards, 1973-2006, several hundred postcards
Short Stories, 2001-2005, 8 videos, 17 min: Little Red Riding Hood, Ice Cream, Kalashnikov, Shooting, Flower Is For Failure, A Girl With Pears, A Man With Apples, Uncle Hans, + Despair, 2006, video, continuous loop, Why Did It All Go Wrong?, video, 2006, 2 min 30 s
Chewing Gum Competition, 2001, 40 colour inkjet prints 30 x 40 cm
A series of photographs of chewing-gum marks on the streets of London. Each photograph is accompanied by the name of its location and description comparing the amount of chewing-gum spat out in different places.
A Trolley-bus No.3 Named Desire, 1999
Handles of a trolley-bus covered in padded pink lace. Site-specific installation – part of the Identification project in a number of city trolley-buses in Vilnius. Duration on route – 1 week. Documented by the artist.
Paulina Egle Pukyte is an artist, writer, and cultural commentator. She graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Art, and received a Master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2001-2003 and 2006 she was a guest lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Art Kaunas Art Institute. She had more than 10 solo shows, including 2 at the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre (in 2001 and 2006). In her visual art practice she mostly works with moving image and found artefacts. She contributes to the cultural weekly 7 meno dienos (7 Days of Art) and other publications in Lithuania.
Art Critic on…
Paulina Pukyte’s art exists in an intermediate space – between cultures, between disciplines, between text and image, between public and private. Pukyte is attracted by things and phenomena that are marginalised, “non-artistic”, unimportant, even banal. She lifts whatever has been at our feet (or at hand) to eyelevel and makes us look at things that we have (un)consciously deleted from our field of vision. As a rule, we delete the unpleasant, the uncomfortable, the incomprehensible, the alien. Pukyte picks up discarded, “repressed” images of reality and displays them in a different context. The tensions and comic elements that arise from dividing her time between two cities and many cultures are perfectly revealed in Pukyte’s semi-fiction books Their Habits (Tyto Alba, 2005), Fake Rabbit (Apostrofa, 2008), and A Looser and a Do-gooder (Apostrofa, 2013). Either in London, or Vilnius, or in any other city, Pukyte always remains in artistic opposition to the dominant discourse.
Laima Kreivytė