Dear reader,

A ripe peach is a solid hand grenade. In one of its many origin stories, the first pomegranate fruit was also supposed to be a bomb thrown at a newlywed couple. It never went off, and the forbidden lovers fished out the seeds from a puddle of oxen blood. Outside of stories, we pick clean, odorless fruit from systems of trade and shelving. Ripened amongst bodies, they protect and nourish us.

This paragraph once served as an introduction to a magazine that I was invited to edit. It still seems like the best way to welcome you to a book. The texts collected in Mirror Mirror are a result of numerous invitations – to join shows, events and pages and leave my mark there. I am endlessly grateful to these friends and acquaintances from different points in my life, to the circumstances that put us together and, of course, to you, dear reader. Reading and being read puts us in a special relationship – and what better way to kick it off than by listening to me ramble about fruit?

Most of the texts in this book are presented in their original form, collected from catalogues, leaflets, magazines and posts. Some were slightly edited for clarity, some remained untouched, some I had to tear myself from before I rewrite them completely. Dear reader, please step your eyes into my mirror of mirrors, instances of inconsistencies, a peach party of closeness and whatever else you make it out to be. I hope your time here will be explosive, delicious and entirely worth it.

Monika Kalinauskaitė is a writer and curator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her texts bounce between the boundaries of art criticism, fiction and poetry, celebrating the fluidity of language and the emotional extremities hiding in simple concepts. Monika’s work has been featured in literary magazines (Fireflies, PaperWork, The Happy Hypocrite 10: Tolstoevsky et al.), exhibitions and catalogues (most recently – the Sun & Sea: Marina vinyl-catalogue for the Lithuanian National Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and Emilija Škarnulytė’s project Manifold at the 22nd International Triennale di Milano) and Lithuanian and international art media. As a curator, Monika worked with the JCDecaux Award exhibition series at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius in 2018–2019, as well as independent projects by emerging artists. She is currently working at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts.