Relic by Marytė Dominaitė

Jewellers usually decorate the vulnerable, erogenous parts of the human body: the neck, earlobes, wrists. Fingers. Their work seems to show where the gaze should be directed, to attract it and draw it in. But at the same time, it also opens up and directs them, and, as we know, the gaze is no better than the word at hurting. And it is a rare jeweller who remembers that the vulnerable part of the body is the abdomen as well as the chest – of course, a man is not a dog or a wolf who shows the stronger man his belly, uncovered by anything, to surrender. But still. Sigitas Virpilaitis once remembered this, when he created a wooden, comically bright pink chestplate for the exhibition “Enemies of the Body”.

And now Marytė Dominaitė (Lithuania) is showing the chestplate as a relic from a set of armour from the past that never happened. A chestplate created in the past tense by another artist, an object that has survived as a memory. But a memory that, if we could, we would be happy to replace. We would punch holes like bullets, so that everything that was and that we don’t want to remember, would go through them irreversibly. Be that as it may, on the one hand, you cannot change the past; it is there, like scraps of old newspapers, lining the inside of the chestplate. But from the outside it is not visible, the holes of the imaginary bullets- and wormholes are arranged in fine ornaments, and it may seem that we have succeeded in glossing over all that was. If it were not for this impermanence, if it were not for the eternal hanging in the air, with the inner, hidden side turning treacherously in front of the viewer’s eyes. Nothing will save us from the past or from ourselves, no chestplate.