an artist

Spinsters, 2003, single-channel video, 4 min
(from the video series Stages)

The action of this video is set in the Vilnius girls’ borstal. A brick wall, behind which one can see a dilapidated Russian Orthodox Church undergoing a slow reconstruction, situated in the territory of the foster home, hides the inner rhythm of its life – the girls’ daily joys and sorrows.
On the occasion of the end of the school year the girls present a performance, the highlight of which is the “spinsters” show. We don’t see the show itself; it is conveyed by means of several details: a crackling record of a Lithuanian pop song about love, a four-line verse from the “spinsters” show, the back of a young “spinster” dressed in folk costume, looking like an old woman. Despite the girls’ attempts to make jokes on the theme of “spinsters,” these fragments arouse melancholy, as they express the teenagers’ social isolation.