Andrėja Šaltytė’s project Kyiv Tongue is an ongoing research (2018-2021), in which she seeks to uncover language and its social role through film. It is an installation, constructed from individual film scenes, arranged in the gallery space, including a series of drawings and a vocabulary created by the artist.
After the Maidan Square protests in 2014 language has become a particularly sensitive topic in Ukraine. While the controversy over the so called language law was unfolding in the parliament of Ukraine in 2019, the artist was intensively trying to contact and approach Ukrainian citizens within their social environments. Šaltytė focussed on everyday situations in which people operate and exchange language, when language emerges as an intimate rite of passage and does not succumb to external political processes.
In her cinema-related practice, Šaltytė creates situations in which characters behave performatively. The artist believes that preconceptions can be challenged and the established boundaries of social spaces can be extended only by presenting language from a different angle. She uses cinema as a tool to visualise the conflict between intimate and public language. The desire for free expression and the acquired self-censorship are trying to come to an agreement, while religion and secular culture clash and contradict each other.
Andrėja Šaltytė (b. 1988, Vilnius) lives and works in Leipzig. Studied painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts, where she specialised in video and film. She had a solo exhibition at the MdbK Museum of Visual Arts in Leipzig (2019), and presented work at the Cinema Camp “Imperfect cinema” (2018). In 2021 she was awarded the German Federal Prize for Art Students and participated in an exhibition at the Federal Art Gallery in Bonn.
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