Lina Lapelytė: In The Dark, We Play

The Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House presents a site-specific performative and musical video work by artist and composer Lina Lapelytė, In the Dark, We Play (2025) composed and performed in collaboration with Nouria Bah, Anat Ben-David, Angharad Davies, Sharon Gal, Rebecca Horrox, and Martynas Norvaišas.

Lapelytė’s work shifts our perspective to see The Cosmic House, Jencks' former home and post-modernist manifesto, as a theatrical stage and a collage of musical contraptions. Included in her work are parts of a parallel commission by artist and writer Ella Finer, whose lyric essay explores the Cultural History Frieze by William Stok located in the Cosmic Oval (the vestibule of The Cosmic House), and which is fothcoming later this year in the form of a new publication.

Stok’s frieze, commissioned by Charles Jencks, portrays an assembly of influential figures and intellectual traditions from the ancient Egyptian architect Imhotep to Hannah Arendt, through Pythagoras, Hadrian, Erasmus, and others. Each character represents a distinct era, region, and intellectual tradition, symbolizing humanity’s quest for understanding in architecture, science, philosophy, and the arts.

Taking inspiration from the polyphonous ambition of this work, but weaving in new contemporary voices, Lapelytė and her collaborators foreground the mundane and sensory, and invite intimate engagement with the house through their divergent elucidations of the cosmic. The resulting work is an intricate interplay of quotations and a layered dialogue between past and present, the intellectual and the sensory, the cosmic and the human. A series of filmed fragments follow the performers as they ponder, commune, and weave new interpretations of cosmic themes. They playfully inhabit the house, drawing out some details and symbols and sliding past others—like the orbit of a singing comet that comes tantalisingly close before arching far away into mystery.

Lina Lapelytė says: “Post-Modern Cosmology for me is a flux, a changing perspective—all shaped by human interpretation and theoretical assumptions, where no single narrative fully captures reality. I was keen to explore this viewpoint by inviting five artists and musicians to this extraordinary house. Together we collaborate on the work that looks at mundane and arcane as equal players. A play-like approach at a time when the world is being turned upside down in the house that feels like a shelter and dream, allowing voices to resonate and the light to travel.”

Eszter Steierhoffer, Director of the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House, says: “We are thrilled to host Lapelytė's new work, which, just like the house itself, is an exercise in double-coding and polyphony, adding a new layer of meaning and inhabiting The Cosmic House as a theatre where imagination unfolds in a polyvocal performance."