Indrė Liškauskaitė [Lithuania]

 

Red Data Book | sound installation, interactive project, 2017–18

The story of Indrė Liškauskaitė’s work presented at NARRACJE should begin with the book written by the artist a few years ago. Red Data Book: New, Rare and Endangered Animal Species was based on a serious scientific publication on endangered animal species inhabiting Lithuania. Indrė distorted the original descriptions of individual species, adding ‘new’ features to the list. Her text describes, among others, the sounds made by the animals, how they move, what they eat and their natural habitats. While preparing for the publication of her work, the artist wanted to draw our attention to the human need to control nature, which manifests itself even in complex scientific research on the level of endangerment of individual animal species. The project she began quickly gave rise to another: the artist launched an online platform where one may hear the sounds made by animals representing the species modified in her book. If you visit reddatabook.com, you may listen to sounds supposedly made by the ‘new’ creatures, and upload your own interpretation of their noises. Following the indications of the typical features of the species, everyone can publish a sound that he or she associates with the given animal. The database is open for everyone upon registration. The main aim of the project is to analyse human notions about nature and the language we use to describe it.

In 2018 Indrė was invited to an artistic residence in Gdańsk, in the course of which she had an opportunity to get to know Oliwa. She found one place particularly charming: the surroundings of a small pond hidden among trees in the Oliwa Forest. This is where she decided to set her animals free: their purring, growling, chirping and scratching will resound there during the two festival nights.

Indrė’s stay in Gdańsk formed part of a programme of artistic residences organized by the Kolonia Teraz Artists’ Foundation, which obtained funding from the City of Gdańsk. During her residency, Indrė made a sound installation which was presented at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Gdańsk.

locationa pond in the forest, access from Polanki Street

 

Indrė Liškauskaitė (b. 1992) is a visual artist. In 2017, she graduated from the Lithuanian Academy of Fine Arts. Many aspects of her art are related to language as the source of communication and cognition. Liškauskaitė reaches for various uncommon methods of communication: she publishes art books, uses the internet and organizes sound workshops. Her works have been exhibited in Lithuania, Estonia and Ireland. She is a scholarship holder of the Lithuanian Board of Culture (2017) and an artist-in-residence invited to Gdańsk by the Kolonia Teraz Artists’ Foundation. She manages the reddatabook.com website. She lives and works in Vilnius.

« Back

Instytut Kultury Miejskiej
Długi Targ 39/40, Gdańsk
www.ikm.gda.pl

Contact for media:
marta.banka@ikm.gda.pl
tel. 784 594 003

Instytut Kultury Miejskiej Miasto Gdańsk
Narracje 10

Narracje 10