Jurga Barilaitė

Jurga Barilaitė taking part in Artists-in-residence exchange programme of the project “Pažink svetimšalį / Closer stranger”.

Artist will spend residency at the Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Kaliningrad, Russia). After the A-I-R Jurga B. will create new works for the exhibition “Closer Stranger”. In the year 2014 this travel exhibition will be presented in Gdansk, Kaliningrad, Klaipeda.

Jurga Barilaitė (b. 1972) lives and works in Vilnius. She graduated from Painting department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1996. Alongside the mediums of painting and assemblage, gradually she started using drawing, moving image and performance. Barilaitė‘s ideas and imagery originate from her immediate environment: childhood memories and her adolescent rebellion, maternal care and nomadic experience that she combines with a history of art and pop culture. Critical approach towards the local tradition of painting and its discourse, reflection on artist‘s identity and the nature of creative process, as well as the disclosure of feminine construction form the basis of her work. In distinctively performative moving image work the artist employs her body to deliver messages varying from erotica to aggression, sentimentality to irony. The works by Barilaitė are included in the collections of the Lithuanian Art Museum, the Modern Art Center (Vilnius), and private collectors

Project “Closer stranger” 

«Close Stranger: promoting mutual understanding between population of Gdansk, Kaliningrad and Klaipeda through facilitation of exchange in the field of contemporary arts and culture» is a major project aimed at promoting collaborative work of Lithuanian, Polish and Russian institutions involved in contemporary arts and culture, and facilitating a greater understanding between the population of Gdansk, Kaliningrad and Klaipeda through cultural participation.

The project is run by the Baltic Branch of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Kaliningrad, Russia), the Centre for Contemporary Arts «Laznia» (Gdansk, Poland) and Klaipeda Culture Communication Centre (Klaipeda, Lithuania). It is designed for a two-year period, from January 2013 to December 2014.

The project is to launch a wide range of activities targeted at both the local communities and a large trans-border network of professionals such as contemporary artists, photographers, musicians, curators, art and cultural managers etc. A total of 11 exchange exhibitions to display the most interesting contemporary art practices are planned to be held in Gdansk, Kaliningrad and Klaipeda throughout the duration of the project.

Alongside this widely used approach to cultural exchange, the project will employ a number of other mechanisms for enhancing large-scale production- and process-based cooperation in the region.