BODY OF MOTHER – exhibition by Vaida Tamoševičiūtė
2021-11-24
Everything I do is an attempt to find my own reality, says Vaida Tamoševičiūtė and perharps this best reflects the artist’s relationship with her work, which is live and constantly revised. In partnership, Undercurrent and Meno Parkas Gallery present Body of Mother, an exhibition of performance videos on motherhood by Vaida Tamoševičiūtė from December 3 – 19, 2021.
Tamoševičiūtė’s work vulnerably surveys her own feelings and articulates the transformations she experiences – bodily and spiritually. Frictions permeate: personal expectations versus societal, survival as artist/self while becoming a mother, and the perceptions of the individual in the age-long chain of mothers-daughters-mothers.
The intimacy of performance is the absolute medium to engage this topic; the body itself is the means of expression. Gifted to motherhood, the body as a tool for art and the creative process simultaneously return itself to the artist — the work is whole/complete.
Motherhood is personal and universal, everyone is touched by it in one way or another. Vaida Tamoševičiūtė’s work purifies/distills this idea until it becomes a metaphor, sometimes expressed in a painfully direct way, Tamoševičiūtė evokes the entire spectrum of feelings with the audience.
Joseph Morgan Schofield, UK artist, writer, curator, about “The Body of A Mother”:
Sitting with “The Body of a Mother”, I sit with fragments, with details. In many of these works you curate our field of vision, and so you organise our witness. I appreciate this in part because it speaks to that experience of partiality. Many of the signifiers of You are absent – Vaida is anonymised but, crucially, not universalised for the specificities of your body, your feeling, your gender, remain in play.
Image: A video still from Vaida Tamoševičiūtė’s 2019 Mom video