Emilija Škarnulytė: Arrow of Time

Emilija Škarnulytė transforms the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen Lokremise into an immersive, otherworldly landscape using film, light, and sculpture. The exhibition creates an experiential space in which science, fiction, and art intertwine against a vast cosmic backdrop, locating viewers somewhere between the technological present and a future that appears both promising and unsettling.

Emilija Škarnulytė turns her attention to places where technological utopias, political histories, and planetary timescales overlap. A central point of reference for the exhibition, one of the locations where Škarnulytė filmed, is the decommissioned Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, a sister plant to Chernobyl. In its abandoned control room, a python glides across the buttons and switches of the control panel—an image of haunting beauty in which nature, technology, and the afterlife of the nuclear age converge.

The work leads viewers into a world where the human being is no longer centred but seen instead as only a small part of a much larger cosmic and geological system. The installation asks questions about radioactivity, control, technological promises, and the long-term traces of human intervention on Earth. In doing so, it does not formulate a clear vision of the future. Rather, it maintains a state of suspension, remaining open to wonder and fear, confidence and the loss of control, and dreams as well as precise diagnoses of the present.

Biography
Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987) is a Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker. Working between the realms of the documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films, installations, sculptures, drawings, and immersive time-based media that explore the entanglement of the human, the ecological, and the cosmic.

Škarnulytė has presented her work in major solo exhibitions, including at Tate St Ives (UK), Kunsthaus Graz (AT), Kunsthall Trondheim (NO), and Canal Projects (US). Her work has also appeared in numerous international group exhibitions, including at MoMA PS1 (US), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), Mori Art Museum (JP), and Kiasma (FI), and she has participated in the Gwangju Biennale (KR), Helsinki Biennal (FI), Vilnius Biennal (LT), and the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media (NO). She represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano (IT) and in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. She received the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and the 2023 Ars Fennica Award.

Škarnulytė studied sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan (IT) and holds an MA from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art (NO). She founded and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø and is a member of the artist duo New Mineral Collective, together with Tanya Busse. She works and lives nomadically.