Chronicler: Gabrielė Adomaitytė

Gabrielė Adomaitytė’s practice revolves around her continuous research, with tendrils reachingout toward painting’s absorption of technology and the history of archiving. She habituallymarries this fieldwork with her ongoing archive of photographs and moving image work as wellas aspects from previous paintings. Adomaitytė exercises her own methods of revelation andconcealment, the latter occurring as a result of her decisive pictorial rearrangements. By utilizingsoftware, she oversees imaginal transitions that elicit complicated textures and interwoven painted objects that refer back to Cubist fragmentation, though continue to surpass thelimitations of a singular framework. The discipline of knowledge organization is the driving force in Adomaitytė’s formal andconceptual motivations. Her particular investment lies in the emancipatory potential ofreframing archives as sites of cultural memory as they intersect with and are complicated bysubjectivities and digitizing technologies. To this end, the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium, and aniche “clothing museum” located in Kaunas, Lithuania are sources of field research for thisbody of work. The former archive center was founded at the beginning of the twentieth centuryby documentation scientist Paul Otlet and his colleague Henri La Fontaine, after the twodeveloped the “Universal Decimal Classification.” This system of information classificationspurred the envisionment of a universal repository of information and an interest in thetechnology that could make global access possible: a precursor to contemporary searchengines. The fact that this institution remains at the core of Adomaitytė’s research is rooted in itsgrandiose project, as the Mundaneum sparks a criticism of both historiography and futureidealism. In contrast to more official repositories, The Clothes Archive is a peculiar product of theentangled, turbulent history of Lithuania in the 20th century. Located in Adomaitytė’s hometown,this collection is run by a self-taught archivist who turned his home into a shrine of remnantsfrom the Soviet occupation. Adomaitytė remains attuned to the archive’s efforts, and reroutesthem in her project to counterbalance undesired elements of nostalgia in their interaction withboth physical and digital mediations of life. The tension between individual memory and collective memory is thus brought under urgent, wider consideration. Collecting artworks, non-art objects, ideas, or memories inevitably generates a system ofarchiving, whether material or cognitive. Adomaitytė observes the disjunction betweenrepresentation and semiotics by layering images and logics until the picture plane has beensuitably exhausted. She positions frictions and alliances between image economies, which startto take shape as a result of accumulation. The subjectivity of historiography, too, enters therealm of Adomaitytė’s concerns. In Boris Buden’s “Cultural Heritage: The Context of an Obsession,” he asks a fundamental question: “What, if not history, now provides the knowledgeof the past?” As the essay unravels, it is understood that memory has usurped history, and thatcultural memory in particular may provide a new framework for understanding a largelyintangible past. The modes of virtuality and subjectivity Adomaitytė proposes in her paintingsnot only question documentary validity, but also reconcile situated histories, materiality, andperception. The problematic nature of historiography produces a situation in which the way one shapesevents along with the chosen methods of depiction become more important than the eventsthemselves. The extent to which humans can index and store information is likewise wroughtwith the question of what should be preserved. As such, the practitioners of this form must pluckobjects from the past as seen fit, in order to assemble a coherent narrative. What can bedeemed important or throwaway is therefore left to an individual agent – whether that be thehistorian or the artist. The museum, too, becomes a site of historical analysis as a speculativetranslation of politically informed cultural (re)production. Reasonably, Adomaitytė’s paintings undergo metamorphoses between and within sessions.Through a corpus of accumulated gestures, she pushes each painting to the edge, whereexcess is curbed at the last minute. Like digital flotsam, the shapes that result from Adomaitytė’s painting process are largely caught in a nexus point of indexed motifs. While she largely resistsformalist concessions, she nevertheless implicates quotations from her own visualexperiences. Examples of this are ropes from a boxing ring below her studio and pigeons thattend to swarm the Mundaneum’s exterior, documented on site in Mons. Eschewingsimplifications, she expresses her own agency and collates data by linking the multifaceted term“archive” to an expansive image treatment process. In this respect, Adomaitytė’s paintings are questioning documents that are inscribed with subjectivities and traverse information worlds