Beatrice Keniausyte
My deep interest lies in different methodologies of communication - visual, graphic or photographic, written or spoken. I am passionate about constantly re-evaluating the art in the light of the current events and global, urgent issues. My research includes but is not limited to themes of embodiment, altered perception, care and its systems in public-private life, feminism and queer ecology. Unravelling of epistemological and metaphysical constructs is a fundamental part of my research, therefore my art knowledge expands over the boundaries of the medium.
Writing never comes easy. Neither does the life. Even God was pushed through Virgin Mary’s vagina covered in blood and slimy white curd. The first grasp of air and the first taste of milk. The creation of God was marked by agony, together with the inevitable death of heaven he came from. Covered in blood and slimy white curd. The hollowness of the mother’s womb is sacred. She bleeds every month yet resurrects. God’s body and blood sacred, yet not her murky red tampon. Soon there will be a landfill of tampons: red, stinky, disgusting and sacred *hill of crosses*, commemorating all the un-lived lives and freedom of choice over our own bodies and decisions **and then** we will start a new beginning.
Apparently there are many ways to kill a newborn baby. You can suffocate them by pressing a heavy pillow on their head. You can drown them in bath. Just after the taste of fresh yet salty air. Otherwise they won’t drown. Or just by ripping the mother-fucking page. Killing your babies. That’s how I feel when I write. It seems that the preservation of the memory by stopping the bath, stopping the hands pushing their head in the water, stopping the murder - will save it.
Yet with this wordy preservation in a fancy writing app, I am killing them. Did you know I chose the background to be black and letters - white. What an unusual choice. The black ink on the white canvas - so romantic. Although for me white letters seem like holes or openings to the realities I have never touched. I can peak through them. Gather them together to create a big and detailed image in my head of how ‘I’ used to lived. I am not really sure, if the reality I am in right now is the one ‘I’ belong to. When I say I am, I mean merely my bodily presence in which the ‘I’ is housed. Yes, the dissociation with my own body is quite substantial. But I stem or, in a lack of a better term, root from my body presence and interaction with the world. However, it is hard for me to grasp what ‘the world’ includes. I live in the past, present and future at the same time. I interact with with my memories through images, sounds, touch or smell and create hopes for the future, while hearing the washing machine whirl the blood stained clothes from my leaked pad. I am on a cycle. On a cycle of the day and night, on my menstruation cycle, on a yearly season change; generations change, as the world turn around itself and around the sun and repeats the cycle again. I am in a cycle again of being stuck between past, present and future rooting from nowhere else but my own ‘I’.
Perpetual time (Henri P.) is preserved in the memory. The act of recording becomes relational. Holding in your hands the photograph of yourself before you were born. That’s fascinating. That’s the assumption of the Virgin Mary.
Skin and shame - have the same Indi-Germanic root. Does that mean that I am in the shape of shame?
Skin can reveal your true self or cover it like a shell. My skin is the point of convergence. It separates my own entity and sets the boundaries and both reveals and conceals the deepest secrets. Sexuality is the point of connection too. Or a point of touch. Touch which can be allowed only by the existence of my skin and its perception abilities. So my skin can feel. The space where my soul transitions to the body can feel. My mind is filled with emotions while my skin is being touched. I am full. Full with ecstasy induced by a touch of that convergence.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
_Walt Witman_
I am as large as humanity and as tiny as dust. I contain multitudes or maybe I am multitudes. The languages frees me and allows to peak into the ever-expanding universe. I am this universe as well as I belong to this universe.
My practical work analyses time. Because time is relative, the each unique perspective is immensely valuable. I am my time and you are your time. It is interesting how we still find the points of connection, isn’t it?
I am in a journey of finding my own voice. The time I have spent with you I took three steps forward and only one back. Thank you.