Vytautas Bikauskas Xinye Shen

My work revolves around time, rituals, and labour. In ‘Someone Has to Be Counting’ respond to my aunt Dalia’s daily notebooks she has been filling for the past 20 years. Each day takes a column, while categories range from hours worked to irresponsible behaviour. The notebooks are interpreted as her way of grappling with temporality, identity, and the need for structure. Enveloped in my aunt’s cosmology of theatre acting and maritime journalism, this project is a tribute to a life of transmission.

The piece is an expanding multimedia archive of responses to Dalia’s labour, involving prints, calendars, photographs, interviews, audiovisual and interactive media, as well as sculpture and performance. Performative elements were developed in collaboration with Royal Conservatoire of Scotland students whose interpretations shape their form. Collaboration is foundational to this work, and the knowledge of others marks every strand of the archive.

Reflecting on my own context, my dissertation research examines the critical role of performativity in academic lectures. question the potential of multidisciplinary practices like lecture performances to expand the current conversation surrounding lecturing. The dissertation assumes the form of a script for a pedagogical discussion to happen in due time. Both the project and the dissertation act as starting points for greater personal research as the archive remains in a continuous process of accumulation.

This project focuses on modern innovations to traditional shadow theatre and explores the ever-so-familiar topic of war.

Both war and shadow theatre has been evolving with humankind for thousands of years throughout history because people are aware of the brutality and negativity of war to be constantly on the lookout for it. Dictators, oligarchs and political groups are forever committed to waging proxy wars from the safety of their bunkers. And the ordinary people ravaged by war are manipulated like puppets by invisible things, unable to escape from this dimension just as the shadow puppeteer hides behind a curtain and uses the puppets to move the story forward.

I explore the relationship between shadow theatre and modern digital art and try to build on this to think about the relationship between war and people. The shadow puppet participants themselves can become protagonists in the process of storytelling. The audience is allowed to watch the shadow puppet play and, through its limited content, find a way out of the soldier’s situation, face it, or escape from it in the face of harsh reality. In this way, I give the audience an opportunity to better and more deeply appreciate the impact of war on people and their lives and to think about it.