27/01/23 - 11/02/23 | EXHIBITION
Snakes and Ladders | Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė and Jonas Vaitiekūnas

Exhibition open until Saturday 11 February
Visiting days and hours: Friday, Saturday, 2-6pm and by appointment.

Traversals part #1
Snakes & Ladders
Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė and Jonas Vaitiekūnas
27/01/23 - 11/02/23

Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė and Jonas Vaitiekūnas present an exhibition inspired by the game of ‘Snakes and Ladders’. In the board game players navigate from start to finish, avoiding snakes and taking shortcuts with ladders. The game is said to represent life’s spiritual journey, complicated by virtues and vices. Various ideas for exhibition manifest different stops, as the basis for reflections on the artists’ own personal stories, about routes that lead forward but also isolate and become borders.

Jonas Vaitiekūnas
Prepared stone #1 #2 #3... (2023)

Jonas Vaitiekūnas presents a series of unfinished objects. He takes inspiration from a board game he is making for a friend that he has already lost contact with. This tedious act of making the checker shapes keeps him from leaving the house. On the one hand, the process itself works as a border. However, Vaitiekūnas uses it not only as an excuse but also as a way to understand various objects and processes that never reach their goal and investigates how to sustain a creative process permanently in a transitional phase.

Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė
Dreams are Dreamier when Dreaming is Sugar-Fueled (2023)
Set in Stone (2023)

Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė takes recurrent memories of her grandmother as a starting point. Due to her old age, her movement was limited to the same route around the house day after day which led to an endless form of repetition. Aleksandravičiūtė ponders how the same monotonous circular path creates a feeling of security while inevitably moving towards the unknown to come. The artist focuses her attention on small fragments of daily household life and investigates various ways to grasp and preserve the most intimate experiences through them: how something as simple as cooking sugar candies in one's kitchen can turn into a grand task of feverishly preserving something that in its nature is meant to melt and vanish; how casting routes of bark beetles can become an act of deep care.

Traversals is a three part programme that explores the theme of liminal space with a selection of invited artists from abroad. The term liminal can refer to occupying either side of a threshold or boundary. The selected artists’ work question how to inhabit liminality as a place of in-betweens, contingencies and uncertainty.

Dovilė Aleksandravičiūtė, born and living in Lithuania, focuses on identities and entities that emerge in the spaces in-between – between physical body and thought, East and West, visible and invisible, between belonging and being an outsider. This in-betweenness is treated not just as an abstract passing state or space but as a state or space which perpetually flips between permanent and transient.

Jonas Vaitiekūnas, living in Lithuania, is a sculptor whose practice is based on collaboration with other Lithuanian artists, art projects and the DIY community. His work is connected to an interest in the relationship between media and craftsmanship, personal and collective memory.

Traversals has been made possible with the support of Gemeente Rotterdam.

Photography courtesy Jake Caleb