Laisvydė Šalčiūtė. The Bestiary

On November 7 – December 7, 2024, an exhibition of works by Laisvydė Šalčiūtė titled
The Bestiary will be on display at the Titanikas exhibition halls (2nd floor) of Vilnius
Academy of Arts. The opening will be held on November 7, 2024, at 6pm.

In her series The Bestiary, the artist Laisvydė Šalčiūtė interprets the Anthropocene era, in
which we all live, through the prism of medieval bestiaries and Renaissance cabinets of
curiosities. According to the author, in our epoch humankind has become a radical force that
alters not only its own but also other lifeforms’ fate and structure. Yet the artist approaches
this phenomen (self-)ironically, as an expression of human POWERLESSNESS rather than
human power. In these works she tells stories of ECO-ANXIETY, questions and ironically
visualizes the binary of CULTURE VERSUS NATURE and provokes the viewer to ponder the
paradigms of politics, war and biophilosophy. Šalčiūtė’s creative practice is based on the
methods of artistic appropriation and fiction as tools that are capable of paradoxical coupling
of digital images found on the internet with visual and verbal elements of different contexts
and epochs, as well as with classical aesthetics. The artist encourages the viewer of The
Bestiary to consider a non-hierarchical appreciation of all forms of life and the possible
ethical, moral and artistic interdependences it entails.

The curator of the exhibition Laima Kreivytė claims that Laisvydė Šalčiūtė’s The
Bestiary is an inverted zoo. Biped and quadruped creatures graze on canvas and paper,
observed by the all-seeing eye of an ape. Or an elephant. Or a lion. Or a viper. Or a swan. Or-
or-or-or. Animals from medieval bestiaries and the artist’s imagination, mythical accounts
and the expanses of the Internet. They cry crocodile tears and cuckoo from broken clocks,
show the middle finger to the homo sapiens who have come to the exhibition and pierce
them with their gaze akin to a golden scalpel. It is a 21st century bestiary in which chimeras
have turned into hybrids and centaurs have become quadrobers. The Little Red Riding Hood
is hoodless and saint Wilgefortis is beardless.

How should one view this exhibition? From up close and from a distance. Flying by
the works like a comet so that they start to spin like celestial bodies in a space movie. But the
best way is to stick one’s nose into a work (at a distance of Pinocchio’s nose) and explore the
miraculous world of flora, fauna and the virtualised humankind. Since every work contains
numerous scientific, esoteric, mythical, religious, literary and artistic references that
paradoxically blend into a meaningful narrative.