Artist: Egle Rakauskaite (LI)
Genre: Art Film
Lithuania, 2001-2003 / 6 min (Mini DV), b/w & sound

The Film
The video consists of five film-interviews with elderly people from Alaska, Lithuania, Russia, Austria and Italy. Elderly people discuss old age, death, loss and fate. The issues are discussed both as a sequence of personal events of their own choice and as predetermined by external circumstances. Black and white images, subtle editing and the slow rhythm of repeated questions create a classical stillness and monumentality. The variety of psychological characters is unified by the topic with a humanist tinge. The film is an interesting study of 20th century European and American identity, revealing different aspects of the mentality of various nations and their closeness in humanist values.

Egle Rakauskaite
Egle Rakauskaite could be easily regarded as an artist engaged in effacing the boundary between art and life. Earlier in her professional life she produced objects and installations made of non-painterly and non- sculptural materials, but of natural and everyday materials instead. These were either suggesting a process or involving decay, that is, they were, as ‘everything in life’, submitted to the workings of time. She made performances and live sculptures, media usually taken to be so closely bonded to life, as they necessitate the presence of the human body. Egle Rakauskaite is an artist who understands that as soon as she starts to work with ‘real life’, she is undertaking the process of undoing it, rather than producing artworks in which a happy interface of life and art takes place.
(From Bojana Pejic. Art cum Life, or Does Your Mother Know What You Are
Doing?)
For more informationplease see: www.rakauskaite.com