Sunday, October 1, 1pm Galerie Rabus

Audrone Zukauskaite
Vanishing identities in contemporary Lithuanian art

My paper uses examples of Lithuanian contemporary art to explore the problem of national and gender identity. In interpreting national or gender identities, we have to consider who this Other is for whom the subject enacts its roles. Paradoxically, but the case of eastern Europe shows that in the symbolic we can find two different Others: the Other of the past Soviet totalitarian regime, in which women were forcefully represented as political agents, and the capitalist western Other, representing women as objects of desire. How is it possible to evade this double gaze? How to invent new forms of visibility? The problem here is that anyone speaking about non-patriarchal, non-sexist and non-totalitarian representations has recourse to a double strategy of non-visibility. The paper will discuss the double strategy of vanishing in examples of feminist Lithuanian art.