Artists: Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė
Title: Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures
Venue: The Address Brescia, Italy
Photos: Alberto Favara
The Address is pleased to present Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures, the first solo exhibition by Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė at the gallery. The exhibition brings together a body of new works conceived specifically for the Brescia space, continuing the duo’s exploration of the relationships between body, image, and technology. In Gawęda & Kulbokaitė’s practice, the image is never a fixed or determined entity, but rather a site of translation and transition. Materials, surfaces, and projections become tools for probing what eludes definition, the in-between states of the real and the virtual, the corporeal and the artificial, sensation and code. In the gallery’s caveau, the newly published video Spit and Image is presented.
The artwork reflects on the construction of identity and the dynamics of self-representation. Through a direction that alternates between domestic settings and dreamlike visions, the video evokes the familiarity of digital languages, from social media to reality television, transforming them into a psychological and ambiguous substance. Faces, gazes, and
voices multiply, evoking both intimacy and disorientation: the image no longer strives for reproduction, but for the generation of new forms of presence.With Enclosure, Gawęda & Kulbokaitė intervene directly in the exhibition space through aluminum structures and silk chiffon veils that form a system of shifting thresholds. The title recalls the historical process of land privatization. Here, the boundary no longer signifies separation but becomes a permeable, ever-changing surface. The digital prints, layered and translucent, produce enigmatic chromatic and visual variations that shift with light and movement, suggesting an organic relationship between memory, matter, and simulacrum.
The Ectoplasm series moves the artists’ research onto painterly terrain.
Drawing on the notion of ectoplasm, the semi-material substance associated with spiritualist practices, the duo creates compositions where manual gestures and digital processes intertwine. Airbrush, oil, crayons, printed silk, mixed media, and artificial intelligence converge to shape surfaces in which the body dissolves into vibrations of color and layers of marks. Displayed on the walls, these works form an unstable perceptual field, suspended between image archives and tactile intuition. In Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures, the dialogue between the works unfolds as an experience of friction and resonance. Language does not aim for clarity but for the proliferation of meaning. Gawęda & Kulbokaitė work within the threshold where the visible withdraws and reemerges, where distance becomes fertile; a space in which perception and incommunicability coincide, generating a form of pleasure born from the impossibility of full alignment between the observer and the observed.
