Laura Garbštienė

Laura Garbštienė 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 Laura will create new works for the exhibition “Closer Stranger”. In the year 2014 this travel exhibition will be presented in Gdansk, Kaliningrad, Klaipeda.

Laura Garbštienė is born in 1973 in the small town of Vilkija (Lithuania) and presently lives in Vilnius. She completed the Master’s program in Textile Arts at Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts in 2000 and collaborated with the artist and composer Artūras Bumšteinas (artist‘s duo  „G-Lab”) in 2002 – 2005 creating video and sound installations. Since 2002 she is working in the fields of video art, installation, photography, action and performance art. Characteristic feature of Laura’s work is that she becomes an object of her own works. She immerses herself into various situations, becomes an integral part of them and thus provokes the viewer with her performance. The significant aspect of the artist’s practice is the experimentation with language, fluctuation of meanings of the words, chance, provocative naiveté, the tune of subjective emotional experience and generality within the multicultural contexts. In some of her  recent works by Laura Garbštienė one can notice allusions to the discourse of institutional critique.

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.