VILNIUS .- Besides its focus on the history of the diaspora art, the Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art of the LNDM takes no lesser interest in its contemporary forms. This time, a Berlin resident artist, Aistė Stancikaitė (b.1988 in Lithuania), enters into a dialogue with a Swiss artist, Flurin Bisig (b. 1982), who structures his art on the principles entirely different to Aistė’s. This international event demonstrates the relativity of the prejudices regarding the ties with a specific place.

In her art, Aistė Stancikaitė pursues the issues of identity, desire, genderfluid and the structure of sexuality. Her thoroughly layered compositions, mostly paintings combined with drawing, employ repetition, enigmatic figures and the fetishist visual devices to explore the body as a space of psychological reflection and a structure for narrative. Informed by the theoretical systems by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Carl Jung, poised between reality and imagination, human and artificial, Aistė’s art is about the ambiguous, the inner experience and emotional tonality.

Flurin Bisig predominantly sculpts abstract pieces, conceptually anchored to the foundational drawing. Working in classical marble, he converses, via his medium, with the classical works of sculpture. At the same time, the artist skilfully organizes the material of his creative process. He is not limited to sculpture only: his collages and drawings are an inherent part of the same artistic process. Flurin Bisig currently lives and works in Glarus (Switzerland).

The curatorial text is written by Zippora Elders (b. 1986 in the Netherlands), an art researcher of international experience, working as curator and writer based in Germany and the Netherlands. She vividly pinpoints the similarities and differences of the duo: “The art by both artists strikes as enigmatic and impenetrable… In poetic terms, Bisig seems to emerge from to the past, he combines elements of the canon and his personal passions, hoping to find guidelines for his approach to the present. At the same time, his command of the technical and historic principles is epic. It is likely that Stancikaitė comes from the future, referencing the unknown and sci-fi. Anthropomorphised figures, or simply, body fragments move back and forth between the deeper shadows and the foreground. Both artists work with the conscious and the subconscious. The relationships of the body and the humanity are placed centrally in the practice of both of them. The obviously lonely figures seem to search for different truths, trying to escape the norms of the art and life. In terms of geography and energetics, this exhibition for Stancikaitė is homecoming, and for Bisig – a new territory.”