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Swallower of Shades
2023
32'32'' HD, stereo
Swallower of Shades is a collaborative film with Goda Palekaitė that explores the phenomenon of Egyptomania, or the fetishisation of Ancient Egyptian aesthetics and culture in the West.
Shot at various locations in Paris and Brussels, the work is centred around the reconstructed Art Deco Louxor Cinema, while simultaneously guiding the viewer through images and spaces of replication and appropriation: an exhibition of 3D-printed duplicates of Ancient Egyptian artefacts, sequences of the violent destruction of monuments in Hollywood cinema, and a dog resembling Anubis wandering aimlessly in a forest.
Egyptomania stems from colonial and imperialist politics, expropriated artefacts and processes of cultural distortion. The film’s text, written and narrated by Palekaitė, alternates between her native Lithuanian and English, combining critical theory with a disembodied voice lamenting the loss of identity through its displacement and perpetual reproduction.