Laura Garbštienė
Fire
Laura Garbštienė’s work at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen dealt with questions of identity formation in a foreign cultural context. Already one year before the beginning of her residency, Laura Garbštienė started developing a project about language and perception, using foreign languages as a tool for exploring new forms of communication and interrelation. Speaking and singing in languages she doesn’t understand, the artist was doing research on her own personal limits. By performing “identity”, she was looking for symptoms of (mis)communication in society. In Innsbruck, the artist intended to produce a video performance by mixing elements from a Yiddish (Michal Waszynski’s The Dybbuk) and a Nazi propaganda film (Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens). The project was not realized.
Laura Garbštienė studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and has been working in the fields of video art, installation, photography, action and performance art since 2002. Garbštienė’s works often include the artist herself. She immerses herself in various situations, becomes an integral part of them and thus provokes the viewer with her performance. Another significant aspect of the artist’s practice is the dialectical experimentation with language, fluctuation of meanings of the words, chance, provocative naiveté, the tune of subjective emotional experience and generality within multicultural contexts.