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Arts & Communication Textile agency in art

Carpet Museum of Iran that her insight emerged that art, and an active participant in the contemporary art field,
the knotted system of Persian carpets resembles a digital Monika Žaltė has been searching for interactive forms of
representation system expressed in pixels. She discovered creativity that shares memories. She has diversified her
a carpet from the Khorasan region that has 106 knots creative forms, combining artistic and documentary, and
per square centimeter, which is, as we would say, “high- visual and sonic aspects. She has also looked for atypical
resolution.” It allowed her to experience the profound exhibition sites, incorporating the city into her artistic
relationship between tradition and the present (the pleat of research. She opened the doors of an important textile
techniques) and encouraged reflection on the “narrative” factory in Kaunas in the 10 Kaunas Biennial’s “Networked”
th
powers of technology that construct the image. series of events, called “Networked Encounters” (2015),
which promoted artists’ interventions in the city’s post-
5. Sensory memory and identity industrial spaces. The textile industry was intensively
Details of everyday life and the atmosphere of the home, developed during the Soviet era and has remained an
along with the simplest experiences, have become the important part of the memory of Kaunas. However, the
hallmark of Žaltauskaitė Grašienė’s visual installations. life of the city is inseparable from the passing of time
The sphere of textiles is the sphere of private life, often and from the people who live there, their daily activities,
associated with the forms of feminine self-expression . experiences, and states of mind. They create each other and
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Thus, the installations, which form an important part of weave each other into a unique web. Thus, in a company
the artist’s oeuvre, concretize those forms of memory that went bankrupt after the collapse of the Soviet system
and identity that derive from a sensory relationship with and no longer functioned, the artist presented “Eleonora
her immediate environment. The art installation “Cellar” Cabinet” (Figure 5) as a documentary sketch of the life of
(2009) consists of a woven image of warehouse shelves a person in an industrial city. She carefully reconstructed
filled with jars of real jam and yarn bobbins. All of this the working environment of a laboratory assistant at the
leads to the everyday home space, which lingers in our “50 Anniversary of the October Revolution” rayon plant,
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reminiscences as an emotional memory linking visual and founded in 1965 – what was buried on the very surface
tactile impressions. This installation is characterized by an of reality and what was stuffed deeper into drawers or
open gaze at the environment, which evolves into a tactile cupboards. The objects from her office, preserved by family
reflection on the past, offering insights into the everyday members and ingrained in her life experience, have created
practices of life and the manifestations of the ritualistic a small museum collection that accurately recreates the
feminine being, full of its own senses of meaning. In this reality of the late Soviet era. This era, once familiar but now
case, the artist presents the cooked jams lined up on the strange to us, comes to life through these objects. Art critic
shelves of the pantry as a distinctive form of feminine Narušytė has written the following about this impression
creativity and collecting. of a frozen time frame of the past:
The installation “Nastutė’s Apartment” (2010), indirectly “If Marcel Proust came here, he would probably write
dedicated to a neighbor who liked to knit, crochet, another novel because every object here acts as an
embroider, and decorate her house with these handicrafts, involuntary stimulant: two pairs of black shoes in the
gave the micro-history the form of a memoir narration. wardrobe, both deformed by dislocated bones, the
When the woman’s relatives inherited the apartment and
decided to renovate it, the artist captured the authentic
interior and, after the renovation, proposed to cover one
of the walls with a photographic wallpaper displaying the
view of the original room. She has exhibited this wallpaper,
supplemented by drawings and other objects, turning
the story of the woman’s life and her apartment into a
testimony of inevitable change that covers both the very
deep layers of existence and its surfaces.
As one of the main organizers of the Kaunas Textile
Biennial, which has grown into a festival of contemporary

6 On the “homecraft,” the expression and the constructionof
femininity, see Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch.
Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (first edition Figure 5. Monika Žaltauskaitė Grašienė, site-specific project installation
1984). London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010. Eleonora Cabinet, 2015. © Monika Žaltė.

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 8 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1867