LUNAR SISTERHOOD

In the exhibition SILVER GIRLS at the National Art Gallery, Vilnius, 2025

Curated by Šelda Puķīte, Agnė Narušytė and Indrek Grigor

The Moon, the mysterious queen of the sky, has always captured attention in ancient cosmologies. It is the Moon that affects sea tides, fish spawning, and animal migration. It has long been linked to female reproductive cycles, and it determines the duration of the month in lunar calendars. In Chinese mythology, the lunar goddess Changxi gave birth to twelve daughters, who became twelve months. In Lithuanian, mėnuo has a double meaning — moon and month. Mėnesinės (monthlies, moonies) denotes the female period. In LUNAR SISTERHOOD, early Baltic women photographers come together for a fictional dialogue in four languages: Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, and English. Women, who never met in real life but quietly worked in the region at roughly the same time and under similar conditions, meet for a picnic in the moonlight. In this space and moment, a fragmented poetic conversation unfolds around celestial bodies, the female body and its place in history, secrets, darkness and light, private and professional spaces, invisible work, and photography.

Composer: Adomas Palekas
Video: Gert van Berckelaer
Production assistant: Julija Česnulaitytė
Performers: Alina Pilecka, Alexandra Bondarev, Margrieta Griestiņa, Sanna Kartau

A Toast to Sleeping Princess

In Goda Palekaitė’s solo show EYE DUST: AN ADAPTATION OF A NOVEL TO COME at Beursschouwburg, Brussels, 2023

Lecture performance in collaboration with Jonas Palekas (recipe), curated by Sofia Dati

There were three drinks offered in three different vessels and one had to choose one: blood, milk or rheum. We then raised our glasses to Sleeping Princess, and said a toast reading her last words. Before she fell asleep for eternity, under her heavy closing eyelids, she got a dust in her eye and saw the future of us all – of us who nurture on milk, blood or rheum – we have different destinies as we do have different pasts.

Blood drinkers – you will live longer than you want to. Your blood will eventually gain a capacity to refresh itself as if vampire’s. Your hair will grow thick and dark, your eyebrows will grow together, the further years go, the more you will find hair on your back…

Rheum drinkers – this drink is made of the sandy dusty moisty matter that you find in the corners of your eyes. From mouth to mouth you spread you nocturnal hypnotic narratives though all the linguistic organs you posses — tongues, lips, throats and gullets. You hypnotise the others with your calm murmuring voice, transporting the others to the sleep world – your hunting grounds…

Milk drinkers – you trespass from one world to another, from existing to invented, from fantastic to observant, yearning and learning of endlessness. You are excessive, intuitive, daring, motherlike and childlike at once…

 Vampire Bedroom Stories

LECTURES ON THE WEATHER at Tranzit Bucharest, 2022

Curated by Anna Smolak

Vampires have not always been mythological creations – for centuries they were actual and tangible participants of our social fabric. Prosecuted by law, and by the superstitious, they suffered public executions and humiliations for millennia throughout civilisations – in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, in the Americas and later Central and Eastern Europe. Through the figure of a female vampire, contagious and eccentric muse of horror erotica, and folklore, Goda Palekaitė addresses the liminal stages of cultural existence. The performance invites the audience on a boat circulating in Lake Snagov around the island with the Snagov monastery, where Vlad Țepeș The Impaler (better known as Vlad Dracula) might have been buried.

Anthropomorphic trouble

GODA PALEKAITĖ & ADRIJANA GVOZDENOVIĆ 2021

Curated by Arts Catalyst in partnership with Delfina Foundation, performed at Whitechapel Gallery, London

Adopting the lens of the Earth as a historical figure and discursive being, the project addresses ecological challenges, deep time and geological formations, unearthing the troubled relationship between humans and the Earth. The longterm artistic research conducted in multiple locations over two years resulted in a performance, installation, video work and publication. Guided by artists, this performance aims to open the possibility to experience and discuss anthropomorphic troubles, as they share their research, stories and works. Looking at the transitional moments within the history of science and questioning the scientific museological display, the artists invite you to spend time with the bodies of stones, view a video from the fieldwork portraying non-human protagonists, and engage with the history of Earth in a tactile way – in other words, to exercise your gaze and touch for a different knowledge of landscape and time.  

Photo: Katarzyna Perlak

SOMNAMBULISM

EXHIBITION OF PERFORMANCES AT VILNIUS INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL SIRENOS 2020

Goda Palekaitė’s Somnambulism is a five-performance exhibition that takes place in the Bastion of the Vilnius Defensive Wall. Spectators are assigned visitors’ roles in this both archaeological and fictional museum while the performances themselves become artefacts. With the help of the map, visitors move around the Bastion, experiencing lunatism in various ways. The performances presented: Dictionary of Apocalypse, Biographic Disobedience, Advertising Anarchism II, Digestive System of Humanity and Lecture on Eternity. Somnambulism is created and realised in collaboration with artists and performers: Sina Seifee, Caterina Mora, Jonas Palekas, Monika Šaltytė, Denisas Kolomyckis, Agnė Matulevičiūtė, Adomas Palekas, Ugnė Šiaučiūnaitė, Ina Bartaitė, Kamilė Krasauskaitė, Andrius Šoblinskas, Gabija Vaikutytė, and Vilmantas Žumbys.

Photo: Dmitrij Matvejev and Dainius Putinas

DIGESTIVE SYSTEM OF HUMANITY

GODA PALEKAITĖ & JONAS PALEKAS 2019

Performed at Editorial in Vilnius, Centre Tour à Plomb in Brussels and Vilnius International Theatre Festival Sirenos

Performance Digestive System of Humanity is a collaboration between a sister and a brother, an artist and a chef. It talks about the hybridity of history and the agency of collective imagination by inviting the audience to become members of a ritualistic eating-reading group. The performance comprises a script with numerous characters written by G. Palekaitė and five meals prepared by J. Palekas. The characters include Ancient Greek poetess Sappho, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, Karaite archaeologist and falsifier Avraham Firkovič, and many others whose existences questioned cultural clichés and political impositions. The themes make a collage of facts, thoughts, dreams and gossips, which reveal a thick arrangement of contemporary issues: from the politics of historical narratives to the legacy of post-orientalism, from our feminist ancestors to the promise of anarchism. In a simultaneously factual and fictional, precise and absurd conversation, we perform something in-between a theatrical rehearsal, a collective reading and a dinner at a friends’ house.

Photo: Laurynas Skeisgiela and Monika Jagusinskytė

how to infuriate a historian

VIRTUAL BODY INSTITUTION, Brussels, curated by a.pass 2019

In collaboration with Nicolas Galeazzi, Marialena Marouda, Adomas Palekas and Sina Seifee

For the End-Communications concluding her research at a.pass Goda Palekaitė write a script and directed a performance-conference where three historical characters, whose legacy she had been exploring, meet. The debate took place between a 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the ancient Greek female poet Sappho and a controversial Jewish-Muslim writer and journalist Essad Bay. This semi-scripted debate manifest as a live discussion between three contemporary artists and researchers whom Palekaitė encountered within the context of a.pass: Nicolas Galeazzi, Marialena Marouda, and Sina Seifee. They embodied the characters, yet contributing with their own practice.

vodka salt

A.pass’ UNSETTLED STUDY (Curated by Vladimir Miller), performed at KANAL Centre Pompidou, Brussels 2019

The performance took shape as a personal encounter between a visitor, a historical character and artist Goda Palekaitė. Each member of the audience was invited, individually, to spend time behind a huge curtain – on the backstage of a group show of performances Unsettled Study and presented as part of the Performatik festival. A 20 meters long curtain was installed there to create a backstage for historical and political narratives and identities, in which the agency of the imagination is mobilised in processes of truth-making. Mixing her own biography with the historical characters’, raising the questions of anarchism, orientalism, and their legacy in the contemporary world, sharing vodka and salt all night, the artist explored the intimacy with history and with the audience. The space behind the curtain became a hideout from the busy public gaze of the festival goers, and unexpected drunk encounters took place.