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Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas: Devices for action

The work of Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas –born in Lithuania in 1968 and 1966 respectively– takes the form of projects in which they explore the conflicts and contradictions thrown up by the new economic, social and political conditions in the former Soviet countries as they affect everyday life, management of public spaces and the idea of the nation. This exhibition features five installations, the results from their work over the last eight years: Transaction (2000-2004), Ruta Remake (2002-2004), Druzba (2003 - ongoing), Pro-test Lab (2005 - ongoing) and Villa Lituania (2007).

The exhibition begins with Transaction, a work that explores the experiences of citizens as they adapt to the sudden change from one system to another. The title alludes to transactional analysis, a psychiatric method based on applying the scheme of a dramatic triangle in which three roles are assigned: the Persecutor, the Victim and the Rescuer. The project arose, partly, as the result of an interview the Urbonas carried out with Doctor Raimundas Milasiunas, one of the heads at the Vilnius Mental Health Centre, who argued that, in the transactional analysis triangle, Lithuania had adopted the role of the Victim.

In Transaction, the roles in the transactional analysis triangle are played by women, the cinema and psychiatrists. The project studies the cinema as a mechanism used to construct an identity for women based on a feeling of victimisation, and which can be extended to apply to the whole country. The cinema archive brings together more than 50 Lithuanian films produced between 1947 and 1997. One of the women interviewed points to "the absence of a female voice or voices" (in the media generally and in the cinema in particular) as a possible reason behind the adoption of the role of victim. This suggestion provided the artists' with the starting-point for a later project, entitled Ruta Remake.

In Ruta Remake, the archive is formed by recorded voices from radio programmes, films and commercials. These recordings are analysed in interviews with Lithuanian women engaged in different fields relating to oral culture: writers, linguists, musicologists, singers and activists who study the voice as a place between the social and the metaphysical spaces. Ruta is the name of a plant (rue) that is popular both as a symbol of femininity and virginity and for its well-known capacity to induce abortion. In the project, a drawing of the plant serves as the motif for creating the score/matrix for an interactive instrument or device known as the Theramidi. The Theramidi is a synthesiser that operates through an interface installed on a table, responding to the shadows cast by spectators as they move their hands over two sensors.