Justė Tarvydė | LABELTRY - texts and textures
24/03 - 10/04/2026
Until 10 April, the VDA Gallery Artifex (Gaono St. 1, Vilnius) will present the exhibition “LABELTRY - texts and textures” by Justė Tarvydė (Tarvydienė).
Justė Tarvydė is a fashion researcher, associate professor at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and a doctoral candidate in design whose artistic practice examines fashion as a creative medium where text, textile, and embodied experience intersect. Working with the “residues” of consumer culture – clothing labels, everyday fashion attributes, and discarded artefacts – she reconfigures them into poetic and sculptural narratives that reflect on the body, identity, and the social norms embedded within fashion systems.
Women’s fashion is often designed within a framework historically shaped by the male gaze. In the project LABELTRY, the brand label is approached as a cultural fragment that, once detached from its original function, begins to speak in new ways – where meaning, aesthetics, and critique converge. A small piece of fabric once hidden on the inside of the garment is brought to the surface, where it speaks louder than the garment itself. Through poetic microtexts – “capitalist haikus” –the work reveals the encoded assumptions of Western culture, where identity, value, and desire are tightly woven into the language of branding.
Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the “economy of affect” (2004), the project recognizes that emotions “stick” to signs, surfaces, and bodies. LABELTRY exposes fashion labels as affective objects rather than neutral markers: small fragments that carry normative messages about how bodies should appear, feel, and be perceived.
Tarvydė’s installations combine everyday objects with newly activated symbolic meanings. The clothing hanger – an object associated with order and maintenance – emerges as a metaphor for discipline, conformity, and the standardization of the body. Her artistic approach resonates with Umberto Eco’s concept of the “open work”, in which fragmented texts and objects resist fixed interpretation and instead invite the viewer into an active process of meaning-making. Within this exhibition, fashion appears not merely as an aesthetic surface but as a cultural language that quietly shapes how bodies and identities are imagined, regulated, and performed.
Opening | March 24 at 6 PM at the VAA Gallery ARTIFEX (Gaono St. 1, Vilnius).
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