Daughter of Serpents’ Queen. (Re)mapping identity #BERLIN

Solo exhibition by Dalia Kiaupaitė

 

December 3, 2021 – January 21, 2022

 

Sound design: Massimiliano Cerioni and Eduardo Pesole

Video effects and postproduction: Dániel Molnár

 

The video installation Daughter of Serpents' Queen. (Re)mapping identity #Berlin is an invitation to look around and see the transition, which is happening near us every day, every minute. It also encourages to recognize and to support someone near us, who keeps going to the sea and then coming back in order to travel forward all the time.

The main feature – video installation itself - is accompanied by the artist’s paintings created during the AiR program at the Scope BLN, (Berlin). In her visual approach Dalia Kiaupaitė is looking for diverse points of view on time and space.

 

Also featuring videos:

Drop After Drop Even Broke the Stone (2021), created for Piloten Küchen exhibition In Escalation, (Leipzig)

Call me by My Name. Universe (2021), created for Satellites, Laboratory for sounds and soul, (Bochum).

Birutė. If you lose a bet – drink 42 Raw eggs and become a legend, (2021) created for the Ancestras project, (Berlin).

 

Dalia Kiaupaitė is a professional artist of Lithuanian origin, now based at AiR Scope BLN in Berlin. She holds an MA diploma in stage and theatre costume design at Vilnius Art Academy, (2007) and mostly works in and in-between opera, performing and visual arts fields.

She works as a creative partner in the performing arts field in Lithuania on large national-scale as well as niche projects. Dalia has 15 years of professional experience organizing / producing theatre, opera and other cultural events. In addition, her visual works – video projections, painting as well as live performances were presented on-site in Berlin, Bochum and Leipzig, exhibited and published online in Brazil, Germany, Lithuania, Spain and UK.

In her artworks, the reality of the myth as well as national and family heritage become the key to unlocking different themes of the contemporary world - especially femininity, and recognition of cultural signs - stereotypes and archetypes.

She is an individual member of IETM (International network for contemporary performing arts) as well as a member of the Association LATGA (Lithuanian Authorship Protection Association).

 

*****

It was a calm and warm September evening in 2019. I was visited by two foreign artists. After an intensive day of picking and preparing mushrooms and berries spent in forests and fields, along rivers, we were sitting on the terrace of my countryside home in Lithuania. Then, for the first time in my life, I heard a compliment that my relationship with nature is as exceptional as well as my knowledge. Who? Me? I am a city girl who basically grew up on a sidewalk. I hold the fresh and heady air of the Lithuanian countryside responsible for that!

The guests left, but the seed was already sown. This realization has guided me to the origins of a myth: the narrative surrounding Eglė - the Queen of Serpents, which is one of the most well-known Lithuanian fairy tales with many references to the Baltic mythology. The tale features not only human–reptile shapeshifting, but irreversible human–tree shapeshifting as well.

Eglė (Eng. Spruce) who is a rural girl who marries the King of Serpents and moves to live together in the sea. There she gives birth to 4 children: 3 sons and one daughter, who is the youngest one - Drebulė (Eng. Aspen). Then by visiting her mother‘s relatives ashore she betrays her chthonic father. Finally, Eglė turns herself and all four of the children into trees. Drebulė too never came back to her native sea.

Since then, I was questioning myself – where exactly is my own shore? Which cultural background is dominating my mindset? All the while growing up in Eastern Europe, I was seeking to be as West European as possible. At the same time, I felt pretty contradicted about that. I remember how I went through the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 for the first time. Now, after 30 years a natural answer came to my mind – I need to drop me again in Berlin. In the city, which has both backgrounds.

It all started around mid-April 2021. I arrived here in Berlin, while the city was still under the COVID-19 lockdown. I felt so lonely and invisible, but then while discovering the city step by step, I also discovered that I am not alone with this kind of feeling. There are a lot of other human beings around me who are searching for the same things. I started to meet women from diverse cultural backgrounds. Our prolonged encounters usually happened during the time when day turns into the night, when culture turns into nature and when the masculine vibrant city turns into the mystic underworld of the wild woman. Wild woman becomes the inspiration and the goal. 

She wanders into the future, yet she keeps turning back in search of the present moment. *

*Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Women Who Run with the Wolves

 

Barefoot and open-hearted I walked through Berlin following in the footsteps of these wonderful women I have met here - Oihane Amurrio (ESP), Weiwei (CHN), Stefanie Bechtold (GEO), Inti (ARG), Laura Konti (GRC), Viktorija Mamontovaitė (LTU), Nerm (GEO), Rituparna Rana (IND) and others. Each of their stories have inspired, uplifted, and strengthened me on my own.

​