Kristina Žalytė & Daina Eičaitė. Staged Discovery
Staged Discovery is a joint installation by two interdisciplinary artists, examining the relationships between functionality and sacredness, elaboration and simplicity, consumption and overconsumption, authenticity and forgery. Framed by the architecture of the KKKC Fachwerk halls, the exhibition invites the viewer into a sensitive and provocative utopia, where object and belief are brought into dialogue, and where craft, design, and contemporary art coexist side by side.
In the exhibition space – resembling an archaeological site – Kristina Žalytė’s ceramic pieces are laid out alongside strategically scattered “gravel drawings” and procession-inspired “altars”. Gravel, an ephemeral and shifting material, here becomes a reference to a staged archaeological process. Yet its carefully considered arrangement implies not chaos, but an intentional (if fragile) order.
Alongside these objects are exhibited textile works by Daina Eičaitė – garments constructed from mohair squares and cashmere jumpers given a second life. These repurposed clothes echo a contemporary form of “digging” – thrifting through physical and virtual piles of second-hand garments. The act of mending and darning itself becomes a ritual of devotion.
The installation’s various segments – knitted, sculptural, scattered – come together as a whole. Yet this wholeness does not seek to deceive the viewer by creating an illusion of monolithic unity. On the contrary, it deliberately preserves a sense of fragility – as if held together only just – inviting the viewer to contemplate the fragmentariness of both the existential and the mundane, to reflect on objects, their stories, and the sacredness embedded in everyday life.
Kristina Žalytė (b. 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist. In 2017, she graduated with an honours degree in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art (UK) and in 2024 obtained a professional qualification in carpentry and joinery from the traditional craft school Sodžiaus Meistrai. In the same year, she was awarded a grant from the Lithuanian Council for Culture. Žalytė’s work explores the relationship between skill and spontaneity, seeking points of contact between craft, folk motifs, and contemporary art. Her practice engages with the individual’s connection to collective memory, the sacredness of daily life, and themes of vulnerability, grief, and everyday prophecies. She works across a range of media including ceramics, painting, wood, drawing, performance, voice, and text. Currently, her practice centres around themes of archaeology, discovery, ritual, and devotional aesthetics.
Daina Eičaitė (b. 1993) is a fashion designer and researcher who graduated in 2016 with a degree in Fashion Design from Norwich University of the Arts (UK). In 2021, she founded So far a gardener – a sustainable fashion design project that cultivates slow fashion methodologies developed through practice in the UK, Belgium, and Lithuania. Inspired by natural forms and organic shapes, as well as sociological and political dynamics, Eičaitė’s creative work explores themes of primitivism, care, play, and sustainability. Consumer education and the cultivation of a sustainable fashion aesthetic are central to her design practice.