Lina Lapelytė
the Roberts Institute of Art
English - June 23, 2020 13:52 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBVisual Arts Arts Business Careers david roberts studio career museums collection art foundation collecting visual art gallery artistic research Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
DRAF Broadcasts: Podcast with Lina Lapelytė
Lina Lapelytė and Ned McConnell were supposed to meet for an Artist Talk at DRAF on 18 March 2020, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this, the podcast is a space to initially reflect on the immense changes to making, presenting, or thinking about art during lockdown. It has changed time management and pace, as well as underscoring the importance of touring and re-staging large performance works. The pair also discuss the performance that was planned for Glasgow International - similarly postponed due to the ongoing health crisis.
Lapelytė, together with collaborators Vaiva Grainytė (libretto) and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (director), composed an opera called Sun & Sea (Marina). This was their second collaboration together, after Have a Good Day!, created between 2011 and 2013 which still tours today. Sun & Sea (Marina) was presented at the Lithuanian pavilion during the 2019 Venice Biennale, in a project curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, and won the Golden Lion for best pavilion, one of the festival's top two awards.
Taking this big project as a departure point, McConnell and Lapelytė trace her practice back through earlier operatic and music-based works such as Have A Good Day! and Candy Shop. Often working with non-classically trained performers, composed music and visual art elements, Lapelytė asserts that staging “improvised music can be like abstract painting”, whilst making an opera equates to other kinds of painting (21:01).
BIO
Lina Lapelytė (b.1984, Lithuania) is an artist living and working in London and Vilnius. She holds a BA in classical violin (2006), BA in Sound Arts (2009) and MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London (2013). Her performance-based practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes, aging and nostalgia. Throughout her artistic career, Lapelytė has explored various forms of performativity, crossing genre boundaries while entwining folk rituals with popular music and opera formats, frequently using stylized expression, grotesque and conceptual musicality.
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