Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė,
YGRG14X: READING WITH A SINGLE HAND
01.04. – 23.04.2023

“The video YGRG14X: READING WITH A SINGLE HAND (2018) examines the solitary act of reading as an intimate and multisensory experience by drawing attention to the entire body and away from the gaze. YGRG14X consists of video documentation of an early performance of the YGRG Manifesto and Paul B. Preciado’s text Gender, Sexuality, and the Biopolitics of Architecture: From the Secret Museum to Playboy, in which Preciado demonstrates how female reading was confined to the space of domestic withdrawal and how both reading and sexuality were internalized. YGRG14X: READING WITH A SINGLE HAND explores an environment and set of gestures that point to the boudoir at the end of the eighteenth century, where reading produced what Preciado refers to as the modern “synthetically mediated” understanding of sexual experience, especially masturbation, “growing out of reading and extending to the non-organic world, to smell, vision, and touch.” In the text, the book—and in the case of the performance, the iPhone, which is used by the performers as a tool for reading, filming, and lighting—functions as an interface for the individual experience of subjective thought, physical pleasure, and imagination—a carrier of knowledge and a recording device.”

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Dorota Gawęda (1986) and Eglė Kulbokaitė (1987) are an artist duo living and working in Basel. Both graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2012. Their work includes performance, sculpture, photography, painting and video. Previous versions of SULK have been shown as part of ANTI, the 6th Athens Biennale (2018), at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan (2018), at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris (2019) and at Kunstverein Hamburg (2021).

Curated by Stefanie Kleefeld.