Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė

Since founding their longterm nomadic project Young Girl Reading Group (YGRG) in 2013, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė have worked together as artists. In the past the YGRG was regularly held in places real and virtual in order to underscore the relationship between textual bodies and collective bodies through the practice of reading aloud together—also in 2017 as part of their display window exhibition at the Kunstverein. Recently, the YGRG has only been held on selected occasions. Now, Gawęda and Kulbokaitė more often use immersive installations comprising sculpture, videos, light compositions, and scents to create fragmentary narratives. RYXPER 1126AE is an olfactory relic from one such narrative. Following their performance YGRG159: SULK at the 6th Athens Biennale 2018, the artists developed this perfume together with International Flavors and Fragrances Inc., a chemist, and a scent designer. It is based on a synthetic molecular replica of a scent that the artists captured with the help of Headspace technology during their performance. Encapsulated in an hourglass, the perfume—and the artists’ annual edition as such—become An Object of Reverence (I–V): a memento of a collective experience, a vestige of the same event it simultaneously documents.