The contemporary moment is marked by the collapse of stable categories (real and virtual, self and other, truth and speculation) and by the proliferation of images and narratives that shape our collective imagination. Digital media, with their ability to fragment and overlap, capture our reflection and throw it back at us as a distorted vision. It is within this state of uncertainty that Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė root their work for Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures, the duo’s first solo exhibition at The Address (Brescia), on view until January 24, 2026.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, “Enclosure”, 2025, installation view, “Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures”, The Address, Brescia. Photo credits: Alberto Favara. Courtesy of the artists and The Address gallery
The exhibition unfolds as a complex, unprecedented journey in which the artists develop a narrative that connects human history and digital presence, aiming to explore the fragmentation of the self in the modern era. Graduates of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, their research has already gained international recognition, having exhibited at Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris) in 2024 and at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) in 2023. In their practice, image and body are not stable entities but continuous contaminations of different media: a space of translation and transition. Materials, surfaces and projections serve as symbolic tools to investigate what eludes classification: the liminality of human identity and how it is defined by history, myth and technology.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, “Enclosure” (split open) VIII, 2025, aluminium, wood, digital print on chiffon, “Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures”, The Address, Brescia. Photo credits: Alberto Favara. Courtesy of the artists and The Address gallery
The exhibition opens with Enclosure (2025), in which the artists dissect the gallery space using aluminum structures and chiffon veils. The title evokes the historical process of land privatization, the Enclosure movement, yet here the boundaries do not divide: they remain porous, spectral, unstable, suggesting new ways of thinking about the limits between bodies and infrastructures. Like the agricultural commons once partitioned by hedges, our lives online are increasingly segmented by algorithmic boundaries. The interconnection between past and present is further suggested by the silk prints, which fade and reappear depending on the viewer’s angle.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, “Spit and Image I”, 2025, installation view, “Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures”, The Address, Brescia. Photo credits: Alberto Favara. Courtesy of the artists and The Address gallery
On the wall unfolds Ectoplasm (2025), which moves the research onto painterly terrain. Drawing inspiration from the semi-material substance associated with spirits, the duo generates a study of marks that allows the entity to surface through the layers. The photographic evidence of spirit séances is replaced here by an imagery specifically crafted through artificial intelligence: by blending images of non-places, corridors, waiting rooms, empty spaces, they train the system to produce something unstable, something that feels familiar yet never fully graspable. The impossibility of completely knowing what one is looking at locks the viewer into a state of uncertainty: this is where questions arise and tension takes shape.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, “Ectoplasm (472Z)”, 2025, mixed media on linen, 50 x 60 x 4,5 cm, “Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures”, The Address, Brescia. Photo credits: Alberto Favara. Courtesy of the artists and The Address gallery
In the gallery’s vault, viewers encounter Spit and Image I (2025), where the duo’s multidisciplinary approach reaches its fullest expression. The title, which evokes the idea of “a perfect likeness”, is reinterpreted to explore the splitting and refraction of the body. Its protagonist is the upiór, a vampire from Slavic tradition, suspended between life and death. Seated at a dinner with her own double, she multiplies through endless mirror effects. The setting, with its clinical coldness, recalls the aesthetics of surveillance footage and broadcast media. Here, Slavic folklore becomes a new system of knowledge that resists Western classificatory logic, a way of re-inhabiting a marginalized past. The upiór, an intermediary, nebulous figure, embodies the contemporary condition through her refusal to be contained.
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, “Ectoplasm (899Z)”, 2025, mixed media on linen, 50 x 60 x 4,5 cm, “Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures”, The Address, Brescia. Photo credits: Alberto Favara. Courtesy of the artists and The Address gallery
For Gawęda and Kulbokaitė, technology is never neutral: like a mirror or a primitive photographic device, it contributes to shaping belief systems. How is it possible to navigate and represent in a world where the act of seeing can never be neutral, and where reality itself seems to flicker and slip, always just beyond the grasp of certainty? Without offering solutions, the artists invite us to dwell in ambiguity and reconnect with what Daisy Hildyard calls the “second body”: the dispersed body, intertwined with ecosystems, data, and history – simultaneously permeated and permeating.
Info:
Dorota Gawęda ed Eglė Kulbokaitė. Incommunicability is itself a source of pleasures
Curated by Riccardo Angossini
7/11/25 – 24/1/26
The Address, Brescia
Via Felice Cavallotti 5, 25121 Brescia
www.theaddressgallery.com
Chiara has completed her degree in Graphic Design and Communication and previously worked as an art gallery assistant, where she developed a strong passion for art writing. She currently contributes to Arteismo, a digital platform dedicated to art, cinema, and photography. Writing serves as a means to explore new perspectives, enhance critical thinking, and deepen insight into contemporary visual culture.
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