Manifold
April 5–May 30, 2019
Lithuanian Pavilion at XXII Triennale di Milano cordially invites you to the opening evening of hypnotic video installation Manifold by Emilija Škarnulytė followed by artist talk with Alison Sperling, and the Baltic Seabed performance in the courtyard of the Triennale building.
Inauguration: April 5, 6pm
Emilija Škarnulytė in conversation with Alison Sperling at 7pm
Followed by performance and DJ set by Baltic Seabed till midnight
Manifold—together with its accompanying programme of events—invites the audience to reflect on the issue of the cracked relationship between man and nature, by diving into the physical and mythological landscapes of the Cold War. The general visual experience of the video installation is a path that takes visitors halfway between an alien scenography and a hallucinogenic kaleidoscope. Manifold fully exploits the research of Emilija Škarnulytė who, in recent years, has achieved wide international recognition thanks to her hypnotic aesthetics of the anthropocene archeology.
Lithuania reaffirms its presence in Milan and on the international scene with the artist who was recently awarded the Main Prize of the Future Generation Art Prize established by the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation. The jury, chaired by the curator Pablo León de la Barra, stated its motivation for awarding the Prize to Škarnulytė as follows: "Her use of video expands into a multi-dimensional experience, confronting many of the major issues facing humanity which are often left unspoken. Without being overtly didactic, the work stays open-ended and poetic while raising fundamental questions about where we come from, who we are and where we might end-up.”
Emilija Škarnulytė is a nomadic visual artist and filmmaker. Between the fictive and documentary, she works primarily with deep time, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Recent group exhibitions include Hyper objects at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Moving Stones at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; and the first Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art; as well as a new commission for Bold Tendencies, London and a solo show at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Škarnulytė is the winner of the Future Generation Art Prize 2019 and has upcoming shows: Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, Canada and 95% of the Universe is Missing, Science Gallery, London, UK. She currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for 16mm analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway.
Alison Sperling received her Ph.D. in literature and cultural theory from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin. Her book manuscript, Weird Modernisms, theorizes weirdness across modernist American fiction through feminist and queer theory. Her fields of research also include science fiction, disability studies, eco-theory, and the Anthropocene.
Baltic Seabed is a performance by Emilija Škarnulytė and Jokūbas Čižikas which consists of filmic, deconstructed, pop vocal choreography diving deep into material sonic textures and rhythms of earthquakes, heartbeats and cosmic radiation.
Organiser: Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
Partner: Lithuanian Council for Culture
Commissioner: Julija Reklaitė
Exhibition design: Linas Lapinskas
Graphic design: Vytautas Volbekas
Team: Audrius Antanavičius, Ūla Tornau, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Dovilė Grigaliūnaitė, Ilona Virzinkevič, Almantas Lukoševičius
Texts: Monika Kalinauskaitė, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Gemma Lloyd
