Eglė Rakauskaitė is a visual artist known in Lithuania and worldwide for being one of the pioneers of Lithuanian art scene in the 1990s. In her works, Rakauskaitė has combined purity, intimacy and emotional depth with a distinct visionary openness to the future.
The work exhibited here is the photo of the live sculpture Trap. Expulsion from Paradise (1995). This artwork was chosen for its intrinsic and in-depth analysis of society, so distant in time but so current in ideological terms. “Thirteen young girls in white dresses were connected by their braids to a strong and seemingly unbreakable live grid, all the while threatening with their silent stillness. This created the impression that we were observing, with a very powerful microscope, the enlarged molecular structure of patriarchal society, which has survived through centuries and is encoded in women’s bodies and dressing code.” Laima Kreivyte (2018) The deep-rootedness of Christianity throughout the changing political systems and its effects on female identities, the transition from childhood to adult age, and the condensed experience of ritualistic silence and physical dependence, in this work silently scream to represent the life condition of women and send a message to the future. This future is constantly in-between what we have been, our past and criticism of our past, and what we will become, where we will go and what lies beyond. Several years after Lithuania’s re-establishment as an independent state in 1990, the artist in fact regenerates the perpetual “feeling of being in transition.”
Rakauskaitė’s work included in the exhibition wants to “scream silently” to the new generations to continue to perceive, read and in some way anticipate the future.
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