object arrives like a bride: a handbook (2025)

Master's Thesis

MFA in Art and Media

Risoprint on paper, hand embroidery on cotton (12 copies)

Supervisor Deepak Unnikrishnan

New York University Abu Dhabi

2025

a thesis, a handbook, an artist book; a bridge between research and praxis. this hybrid book combines essays, poems, and images. it provides another dimension for the visual work and explores themes of object agency, folk museology, and consumer spirituality. how do our intimate relationships to objects reflect on the ways we treat other beings and the world?

Danutė Vaitekūnaitė (b. 1998, Šiauliai, Lithuania) is an artist and educator whose work seeks to reveal invisible systems that exploit human vulnerability. Her worldbuilding practice combines installation, painting, sculpture, writing, design, video, and performance. Revealing the mundane and the overlooked, she focuses on relationships between objects, human and non-human.

Vaitekūnaitė holds an MFA in Art and Media from New York University Abu Dhabi as a Tarek Al Ghoussein Fellow and a BA in Art from La Haute École des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg. Her work has been exhibited in the UAE, France and Lithuania, including Jameel Arts Center, 421 Arts Campus, NYUAD Art Gallery, La Chaufferie, Syndicat Potentiel, Šiauliai Art Gallery and Pragiedruliai. She collaborated on spoken word, theatre and cinema productions in Tunisia, the UAE and France. Danutė currently works as an educator at Šiauliai Art Gallery.

danute.vaitek@gmail.com

hoME