Lina Lapelytė (b.1984, Kaunas) is an artist living and working in London and Vilnius. Her performance-based practice flirts with pop culture, explores gender stereotypes, ageing and nostalgia. Her works often engage trained and untrained performers in ‘singing’ through a wide range of genres, such as mainstream pop and opera to question vulnerability and silencing. Her collaborative opera work with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė, Have a Good Day! received several awards and tours extensively as well as the durational performance Sun and Sea (Marina), which represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and received the Golden Lion award for the best national participation. Lapelytė’s most recent work Currents (2020) was conceived with Mantas Petraitis (Implant Architecture) as a large-scale, site-specific installation and performance for the second edition of the Riga Biennale – RIBOCA2.
By disjointing acts of listening from the ear and its particular arrangement of time, Sonic Continuum proposes a shift from representation to expression and asks: can sound restitute failures to listen? How might we listen to time affectively? What auditory imaginaries and possible futures can listening unfold?
In this operatic interview, artist Lina Lapelytė speaks of how music, musicians and scores enunciate shared forms of being and belonging as they relate to gender and life under capitalism.