They are wanted

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Moterų dailė; Fotografija; Vestuvių fotografai; Women's art; Photography; Wedding photographers.

ENHow to be when people like you should not exist? How to live when the rules are forcing you to remake yourself into somebody else? What to do when you do not fit the given model? These questions link the works by three women artists - Tomaso Binga, Violeta Bubelytė and Laisvydė Šalčiūtė - displayed in the zone "Distorted Mirrors". The Italian Bianca Pucciarelli Menna (Tomaso Binga is her pseudonym) started turning her body into graphic symbols as far back as the 1970s in order to break the forced silence of women. Violeta Bubelytė showed her first selfnudes to the Lithuanian photographers who slighted women’s art in 1981, which she continues photographing. Laisvydė Šalčiūtė has been selfironically exploring bodily excesses and the culture consuming them since the early 1990s. In 2017, a fragment of Laisvydė Šalčiūtė’s work "Imperfect Innocence: appeared on the cover of the Lithuanian edition of Judith Butler’s book "Gender Trouble". This is a wedding photograph, but glaringly strange - "queer". In 2010, Šalčiūtė demanded that her husband, the artist Kęstutis Grigaliūnas, should wear a wedding dress together with her. They stand like this: two white figures against a white background, only their faces emphasised by the dark lines of hair and the dots of eyes. The tulle and guipure of the dresses blur the edges of the figures and dematerialise them. The "newlyweds" almost float in the air. They are lowered down on the earth only by Šalčiūtė’s bare feet with painted nails. What is this? A reference to martyrdom? A rebellion against social norms? But the painted nails in the "wedding" photograph are only an ironic grin compared to the Great Nonsense: that the groom also wears a dress. [...]. [Extract, p. 207]