Marija Reikalas is an interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of installation, painting, sculpture, performance, video and participatory practices. At the moment, she’s completing her Master’s studies at Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto.
Her practice explores memory, impermanence, and transformation in relation to the more-than-human world. She often uses materials such as glass, porcelain, soil, water, and organic matter to investigate the relationships between time, space, remembrance, disappearance, and speculative memory. Her research is exploring boundaries of sentience, extending towards questions of ecological loss, deep time, human-non-human relationships and ways of moving beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Through material processes and temporary, ritual-like situations, she explores how absence can be given form without being fixed into a permanent object. Her most recent work focuses on eco-grief and collective mourning, considering how artistic practice can create spaces for shared experiences of loss and alternative forms of commemoration.
Reikalas' work is dynamic, ephemeral, and performative, site-specific when possible and fluidly entranced by the circumstances of its creation. She does not wish to leave a permanent trace, nor does she desire her work to last a hundred years. Instead, she aspires to live through her work, to connect to her surroundings, and to reflect the world acting as a mirror, or rather, a reflection of light on the surface of rippling water.
