2020 – Installation Favourite Jacket, a part of the section : Fabrics Of Memory in Lee Mingwei, Li / Gifts and Rituals , Gropius Bau, Berlin – Mitte, Germany
This jacket and a few photos are the only items that have remained from my childhood. Since then they have accompanied me like fetishes on my path through the world as an artist. I was born 1966 in Siauliai, Lithuania, which was unwillingly part of the USSR then.Due to the economy of scarcity during my childhood and adolescence, a heavy grey dominates my memory. This jacket was my favourite jacket ; there was no other. It had to last me from age two to five ,preferably until I started school. That´s why my mother lengthened the sleeves over and over again.
When I moved to Germany as an artist after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I only had a few of my works of art in my luggage, as well as this jacket and a few photos to remind me where I’d come from. In the years that followed, from 1997 to 2010, this jacket accompanied me in my translocated and unsettled life as an artist, when I moved to Buenos Aires and Windhoek and back to Hamburg, before ending up near Berlin permanently in 2014. My art objects were sold or ”disposed of” due to moving or even burned in performances – as on 03.12.2004, Leaving ashes for Argentina , Ribera del Rio de la Plata, San Isidro, Pv. de Buenos Aires, Argentina – ; but the jacket was always there as a fetishised object and fixed point in my life; thus reinforcing my sense of an individual identity as an artist.