Exhibition ‘Respawn’ by Hanna Ijäs and Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Dísa), curated by Ignas Pavliukevičius together with AI

An exhibition titled ‘Respawn’ by Finnish artist Hanna Ijäs and Icelandic artist Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Dísa) opens at Atletika gallery (Vitebsko 21, Vilnius) on 27 October 2022, curated by Ignas Pavliukevičius and AI language model GPT3. This exhibition is the result of the two-month artist residency at the cultural centre SODAS 21232. On the opening night on 27 October, from 7 pm, artist Hanna Ijäs together with sound artists Edvinas Gruodis Siliūnas, Karolis Brežinskas and Kristupas Kmitas will present the performance ‘Lie Down Where You Want to Be Stepped On’.

The exhibition titled ‘Respawn’* is about humans standing on the doorstep of a new era that will transform it in ways one can barely comprehend. ‘Uncertainty looms large as we can only guess what is to come. We are repeatedly reminded to consider the impact of non-human intelligence on our future and other life forms whether it may be a collaborative network of the forest, a gaming algorithm, fungi, blockchain technologies, or machine learning. We ought to open up the human understanding to other kinds of intelligence and perception, recognize our interconnectedness with another kind of species, and take a fresh look around expanding the definition of authorship where the work can be created by non-human entities or in collaboration with them’ – says exhibition curator Ignas Pavliukevičius and AI model GPT3.

Exploring the uncertainty of the present and in search for the non-found, the two artists ­– Hanna Ijäs and Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Dísa), who spent two months at their residency at SODAS 2123 together, introduce the viewers to their own perspectives.

Dísa’s works talk about how animals instinctively lick the earth for the salts and minerals that make up its composition. This made them travel great distances to find the perfect puddle, where the imprints in the earth became roads, and roads became civilization’s infrastructure. A stone is a cornerstone of the landscape, a starting point for a journey, and a landmark to determine where we are in relation to where we live. In the exhibition at Atletika, Dísa creates a unit of cosmic construction, which she explores in conversation with ideas of terraforming and other planets—origins of life or origins of other life.

Hanna Ijäs work is traveling to a place where fantasy, imagination, and reality overlap. Hyper emotions, hyper-personalities, and hyper-realities are all possible – unprotected, unfettered by physicality. Her installation at Atletika investigates this new species that is evolving as worlds of online and offline life collide. With her work, she explores this new transitional state where emotion dominates and overcomes rationality – where human beings cease to be human in any way – where new forms of being are emerging as the lines between our online and offline lives continue to blur.

Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Dísa) is an artist, writer, and researcher. Their practice is based on creating poetic connections through the interweaving of themes such as landscape, technologies, bodies, and economic power. In the last years, she has focused on alternative understandings of nature and decolonial readings of land.

Hanna Ijäs is a multidisciplinary artist and performer currently based in Helsinki, Finland. In her recent work, Ijäs is trying to make sense of collective needs and desires for control, manipulation, and communication through performed games and texts. In the center of her research stands the ongoing interest in mapping out the modern human at large in the digital and physical realms.

Ignas Pavliukevičius is an artist, curator, lecturer, and PhD candidate at Vilnius Academy of art. His interests lie in life mediated by technology, its impact on emotional exchange in a digital society and emotional relationship with artificial digital agents. He curated festival Umėdė (2021) and Ars Electronica Garden Vilnius in (2020), and worked as an interactive media curator at Lithuanian pavilion Lithuanian Space Agency at Venice Architecture Biennial 2021. Pavliukevičius is currently a member of the curatorial team at Atletika gallery.

GPT3 is a third-generation generative pre-trained transformer, a neural network machine learning model trained on web data. It is a natural language generator the main task of which is to generate human language text.

Artists: Hanna Ijäs and Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Dísa)

Curators: Ignas Pavliukevičius and AI language model GPT3

Text by Artificial intelligence model GPT3, Ignas Pavliukevičius, Hanna Ijäs, Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Disa)

Visuals: Ignas Pavliukevičius and AI model DALL·E 2

Graphic design: Dovydas Černiauskas

Technician: Jan Glöckner

Hanna Ijäs costume design: Karolina Janulevičiūtė

Special thanks to Indrė Liškauskaitė

Exhibition opening and performance by Hanna Ijäs together with sound artists Edvinas Gruodis Siliūnas, Karolis Brežinskas and Kristupas Kmitas ‘Lie Down Where You Want to Be Stepped On’ 27/10/2022 19:00.

Exhibition dates: 28/10/2022 – 17/12/2022 Wednesdays to Fridays 16:00 – 19:00 Saturdays 13:00 – 17:00.

Gallery Atletika, Vitebsko 21, Vilnius. Entry to the gallery is free.

Organised by cultural centre SODAS 2123 together with Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association.

The project is supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality, the Stabilisation Fund for Culture and Education 2022 of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut, Muggs Resident Fund, supervised by the Association of Icelandic Artists.

Artist residency is supported by Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.

Main information partner – 15min.

* in computer game terminology ‘respawn’ is the recreation of an entity after its death or destruction, perhaps after losing one of its lives.