The friends of the GfZK visited the artist Andrėja Šaltytė in her studio in Leipzig.
The central theme in her work is language. In her film project “You speak, but the language is not yours” (2018-2022) she deals with the politics of language in Ukraine after the Maidan protests.
Her artistic practice is accompanied by the question of which language may be spoken in which spaces and who determines this. The work was created at the same time as the controversy surrounding the so-called language law “On the Function of the Ukrainian Language as an Official Language” in 2019. Her work shows everyday situations in which language serves interpersonal exchange rather than being a subject of external political processes. Featuring a song of Ukrainian and Russian swear words composed by Alexei Schmurak for the project, the film alternates between freedom of expression and self-censorship as well as seriousness and comedy.
Andrėja Šaltytė (b. 1988, Vilnius) lives and works in Leipzig. She studied painting at the Vilnius Academy of Art and at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. In 2018-2021 she was a master student in the class “Expanded Cinema” with Clemens von Wedemeyer. Her work has been shown in a solo exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (2019) and at Cinema Camp “Imperfect cinema” (2018), among others. In 2021 she was awarded the Bundespreis für Kunststudent:innen.