Lina Lapelytė: Pirouette

Rupert is pleased to announce Pirouette, the first solo exhibition of Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė. The show includes a series of newly-commissioned live performances and sound works presented in a specially-conceived environment by Lithuanian architect Mantas Petraitis. Lapelytė’s performance-based practice is deeply rooted in music and pop culture and within her practice, the artist often discusses the topics of gender stereotypes, aging and nostalgia. Throughout her artistic career, Lapelytė has explored various forms of performativity, crossing genre boundaries while entwining folk rituals with popular music and opera formats, and frequently using stylized expression, grotesque and conceptual musicality. 

Pirouette emerged from Lapelytė’s recurrent interest and research into the process of aging, life cycles, human vulnerability and codes of behavior. One of the elements of the show is installation The trouble with time, the sound for which was recorded with musician Rhodri Davies inside the French pavilion of this year’s Venice Biennale (Studio Venezia by artist Xavier Veilhan). The remix of sound will accompany the recordings of text fragments written and selected by Jonas Mekas, Nijolė Šivickas, John Tilbury, Noa Eshkol, Richard Wentworth, Nigel Rolfe, Marianne Eigenheer, Phill Niblock, Katherine Liberovskaya and others. New performances and sound works including Pirouette, The Mickey Tale, and Play for the Parallels will form the base of the exhibition, cross fading within time and space. The documentation of the exhibition will later form a new video work by Lapelytė.

The closing event of Lina Lapelytė’s exhibition at Rupert on December 17 will include a performance by musician and composer Charlemagne Palestine (b. 1947, Brooklyn, New York). Currently Brussels-based, Palestine is best known for his avant-garde and experimental music compositions in the beginning of 1960s. His name was often numbered among contemporaries such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. In Vilnius, Palestine will perform a music piece for clavichord owned by Lapelytė.

Lina Lapelytė is an artist living and working in London and Vilnius. Her most recent large-scale work is the opera Sun and Sea presented at the National Gallery of Art together with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė (Vilnius, 2017). The German version of the work will be shown at the Staatsschauspiel Dresden in 2018. Lapelytė’s performance Candy shop - the Circus was recently shown at the FIAC (Paris, 2017) and Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona. Other recent shows and performances include: 1857, Oslo (2017), Kunstraum, London (2017); Venice architecture Biennial, Venice (2016); CAC, Vilnius (2016), Focal Point Gallery, UK (2016), Double Bind, NYLO, Reykjavik (2016), Hayward Gallery Touring, UK (2015); Block Universe, London (2015); Serpentine Galleries, London (2014); Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2014); David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2014/2017); Queen Elizabeth Hall, London (2014). In 2018 her works will be presented at the Baltic Triennial, curated by Vincent Honnoré.

Rupert’s exhibitions program was set up in 2013 with the aim to realize ambitious projects utilizing alternative exhibition formats. Since its inaugural exhibition by Spanish artist Dora Garcia, entitled Jerusalem of Europe, Rupert has hosted major presentations by artists Laure Prouvost, Dan and Lia Perjovschi, Phanos Kyriacou and others. Originally an itinerant educational platform, since 2013 Rupert has also operated as a successful residency program, welcoming artists, theorists, curators and various other practitioners from the fields of contemporary art, creative writing, critical design, architecture, cinema and beyond. Its three programs are an effort to inspire and encourage inter-disciplinary exchange, alternative education and exhibition structure experimentation in Lithuania and abroad. 

Curator: Justė Jonutytė
Architect: Mantas Petraitis
Assistant Curator: Kotryna Markevičiūtė
Project Manager: Vitalija Jasaitė 
Producer: Rupert (Vilnius)

Main sponsors: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and Pakrantė.