Artists

Agnė Juodvalkytė is a visual artist currently living in Berlin and Vilnius. Her practice is largely focused on abstract painting and textiles. Juodvalkytė uses textiles as a framework to understand culture, history, and technology. She works with different materials, such as clothes, textiles, natural pigments, graphite dust, fabrics made by her grandmother, plants, and incorporates various mediums. Often presented in an anthropomorphic way, her works breathe their past into the present, becoming multidimensional artefacts extending not only into space but also into time. She received a BA in painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2010) and studied visual arts in Spain at the Universidad de Castilla La Mancha (UCLM, Cuenca) (2009). Her recent shows include solo exhibitions Tools for the Future (ANSKA), Galerie Bernau, Bernau bei Berlin (2022), and ANSKA, Blake & Vargas, Berlin (2021), as well as group exhibitions Sweet Dreams Foundation, Nida Art Colony, Lithuania (2022); Gathering, Atletika, Vilnius (2021); and Audra, Pamario Gallery, Juodkrantė (2021).

juodvalkyte.wordpress.com

Anastasia Sosunova is a visual artist based in Vilnius. Her multidisciplinary practice is comprised of video, installation, sculpture, graphic art and writing. Sosunova manipulates personal stories, images that define locations and subtle material gestures people leave behind in the environments they inhabit. Recent exhibitions and screenings include: Kogo, Tartu; online pavilion of the Wrong BiennaIe; I: project space, Beijing; Contemporary Art Center, Rupert and Editorial, Vilnius; The Sunroom, Richmond and other. Recent residencies: Rupert in Vilnius, Achterhaus Ateliers in Hamburg, Fynske Akademie in Odense.

anastasiasosunova.com

Anne-Sophie Turion is an artist based in Marseille, France. Whether on stage or in the public space, Anne-Sophie Turion invents artwork as if she was creating rifts. Through performance, installation, and interventions in urban spaces, her work tackles and re-qualifies the notion of reality with a willingness to shift it towards the realm of fiction. Her work has been shown in exhibitions as well as in theatres: at the Magasin CNAC Grenoble, Festival Actoral (Marseille), Centre d’Art de la Ferme du Buisson (Noisiel), Centrale Fies Italy (where she was granted the Performance Art Award in 2013), Théâtre de la Cité Internationale within the context of New Settings program – Fondation Hermès (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), 3bisf (Aix-en-Provence), Kunsthal Aarhus (Danemark), among others.

annesophieturion.com

Antoine Nessi is a French sculptor. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Paris. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions, including the Pipe Factory in Glasgow, 360 m3 in Lyon and Interface gallery in Dijon. He has participated in various group exhibitions including “Par les temps qui courent” at the Grand Café art centre in Saint-Nazaire, France, “Being thing” at the Centre d’art et du paysage in Vassivière, France and “The Promise of Moving Things” curated by Chris Sharp at the Centre d’art contemporain Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine, France. He has done several residencies, including Glasgow Sculpture Studios in Scotland and at the Darling Foundry in Montreal, Canada.

antoinenessi.com

Daiga Grantiņa lives and works in Paris. Grantiņa’s sculptures investigate the encounters between materials and their consequent relationships of dissonance and consonance, inducing an exercise in expanded vision. Her material gestures resonate with the structural shifts of organisms and environments, navigating relations of volume and form at the point where microscopic and macroscopic overlap and intersect. Her abstract vocabulary borrows from bodies and landscapes to explore indescribable matter, a plastic investigation of the formless and misshapen. Intuitively concocted forms self-consume and self-produce, at once a continuous development of a shared idea and a space of tension where the hierarchies of perception find themselves rearranged. An exhibition of Grantiņa’s work will be held at Kunstmuseum Bern (2024).

Daria Melnikova lives and works in Riga. She has held solo shows at Gallery Vartai in Vilnius (2020), Karlin Studios in Prague (2019), PLATO in Ostrava (2019), Kulturfolger in Zurich (2018), Kim? in Riga (2017, 2014, 2011), ISSMAG gallery in Moscow (2017) and Vita Kuben in Umeo (2014), and has participated in group shows at KHB in Bratislava (2019), Kiasma in Helsinki (2018), Rupert in Vilnius (2018), Silberkuppe in Berlin (2017), Art in General in New York (2015), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2014) and others. Melnikova is the first laureate of the Kim? Residency Award (2015), her works are included in the collection of Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland and private collections.

dariamelnikova.com

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are an artist duo based in Basel. Both are graduates of the Royal College of Art in London and founders of the YOUNG GIRL READING GROUP (2013–2021). They work in multiples across performance, painting, sculpture, fragrance, and video installation—where language breaks down and one genre morphs into many. An interest in folklore runs through their work weirding the relationship between the body and the landscape. The duo has exhibited internationally including: Shedhalle, Zürich (2022); Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022); Kunstverein Hamburg (2021); Istituto Svizzero, Palermo/Milan (2021); Swiss Institute, New York (2020); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2020); Kunsthalle Fribourg (2020); Futura, Prague (2019); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); 6th Athens Biennale (2018); Kunsthalle Basel (2017); ICA, London (2017); MOMA, Warsaw (2016); Berlin Biennale 9 (2016), among others. They are the recipients of the Allegro Artist Prize (2022); CERN Collide Residency award (2022), and the Swiss Performance Art Award (2021).

gawedakulbokaite.com

Dovydas Strimaitis is a Lithuanian contemporary dancer, living and working in Marseille. Dovydas started dancing in Lithuania at the age of 12. After graduating high school, he enrolled in a dance bachelor degree program at Codarts university in the Netherlands. There, he worked with famous and upcoming choreographers such as Jiri Kylian, Cayetano Soto, Joost Vrouenraets, Jarek Cemerek, and Alleyne Dance. During the internship year, Dovydas danced in Jitti Chompee’s “18 monkeys dance theater” in Thailand, participated in the creation process in Gothenburg Opera’s Dance Company with choreographer Marina Mascarell, and performed in the restaging of Jan Martens’s “Pretty Perfect”. Since 2019, Dovydas has been dancing in Le Ballet National de Marseille, under the direction of La Horde, where he works with La Horde choreographers Alessandro Sciarroni, Lucinda Childs, Lasseindra Ninja and Tânia Carvalho.

dovydas-strimaitis.com

Eglė Budvytytė creates performance situations to explore the relationships between body, architecture, environment and audience. By choreographing performers to enact gestures that can often seem contradictory to their surroundings, uncannily out of context and sometimes filled with a sense of emergency, she looks at the body’s ability to challenge conventions of conduct and the narratives of normativity implicit in public spaces.

eglebudvytyte.lt

Ella Kruglyanskaya lives and works in New York City. Kruglyanskaya was raised in Latvia, where she studied at the Jan Rosenthal Secondary Art School in Riga. After immigrating to the United States with her mother and grandmother in 1995, Kruglyanskaya attended the Cooper Union in New York City before completing her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2006. Working as a freelance graphic designer until 2011, Kruglyanskaya references the myriad ways that visual culture has depicted modern womanhood, celebrating and exploring the complexities of female identity and experience. Her figures exude a sense of power and confidence, while also conveying a range of emotions, from joy and pleasure to vulnerability and defiance. Her work often references popular culture and art history but reinterprets these influences through a contemporary feminist lens. Blurring hierarchies between drawing and painting, Kruglyanskaya’s work simultaneously recalls vanitas still lifes and the walls of her studio, employing trompe l’oeil to juxtapose torn paper edges and dirty paintbrushes against lurid plaids and gestural illustrations of her protagonists. Recent solo exhibitions include Bortolami, New York (2021); Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2020); Feuilleton (2020), Los Angeles; and Real Pain (2020), Los Angeles.

Emilija Škarnulytė is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Vilnius, La Caleta, Spain, and Tromsø. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political—her blind grandmother gently touches the weathered statue of a Soviet dictator; neutrino detectors and particular colliders measure the cosmos with otherworldly architecture; post-human species swim through submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle and crawl through tectonic fault lines in the Middle Eastern desert. Winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulytė represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Tate Modern, London (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (2021), and the National Gallery in Vilnius (2021). Her films are in the collections of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), Kadist Foundation, and Centre Pompidou, and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and numerous international film festivals. She is a founder and co-director of Polar Film Lab, and a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective.

emilijaskarnulyte.com

Evita Vasiļjeva lives and works in Paris. Vasiļjeva works with sculpture, installation, and sound. Having grown up in Latvia in the period of post-Soviet transition, the artist often draws on visual and sonic imagery of generic architecture and rough suburban landscapes. She creates objects, devices, and interactive installations by appropriating materials typically used for construction, such as concrete, armature, metal profiles, lanterns, and various electrical appliances, and by combining them with household objects, including beds and blankets, fridges, microwaves, and soap, but also movement sensors, which were commonly used in Latvia in the 1990s to secure houses. By manipulating and repurposing a large variety of materials, Evita Vasiļjeva invents her own aesthetic, as well as provokes relational dynamics between spaces, architecture, memory, and spectators’ bodies. While her works tackle issues of anxiety and control, through ways of coexistence within the present moment, they always remain open for multiple interpretations. Recent exhibitions include: the Lyon Biennial (2022); Blue Lagoon House (with Kaspars Groševs), Cēsis Contemporary Art Centre (2022); and Baltic Triennial 14, Vilnius (2021); among others.

evitavasiljeva.com

Flo Kasearu lives and works in Tallinn in the Flo Kasearu House Museum which she established in 2013. Her activity-based practice takes on the form of videos, photography, painting and installations. Her works are seasonal and explorative, dissecting problems at a grassroots level and dealing with topics such as freedom, patriotism and nationalism, domestic violence, and the tension between public and private spaces. Often working in a fast and reactionary way, Flo Kasearu reacts to different social processes with a refined sense of humour, as well as often elevating seemingly mundane biographical events into works of art.

flokasearu.eu

Ieva Epnere lives and works between Riga and Berlin where she is a current fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She creates photographs, video works and films, where personal, private stories are the starting point for artistic reflections on identity, traditions and rituals. Selected solo-exhibitions: “On Water, Wind and Faces of Stone,” Fogo Island Gallery, Fogo Island (2018), “Hybrid Identities,” HIT Galery, Bratislava (2018), “Sea of Living Memories,” Art in General, New York (2016); “Pyramiden and other stories,” Zacheta Project Room, Warsaw (2015); “A No-Man’s Land, An Everyman’s Land,” kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga; “Waiting Room” (2015), Contretype, Brussels; “Mindscapes” (2013), kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga.

ievaepnere.com

Ingel Vaikla is a visual artist and a filmmaker based in Brussels who works primarily with video, 16 mm film, and found footage. Vaikla’s artistic practice focuses on representation of architecture as a storyteller and on the relationship between urban space and its communities. She is on a constant search for visual language that would not simply observe architecture as an aesthetic sculptural form but would translate the existential, conceptual, and ideological qualities spaces manifest. She believes spaces do not only provide shelter but often become the concrete extension of our imagined identities and fluid bodies. Ingel is a former artist in residence at Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK), Ghent (2018–2019), Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2021), and is currently a PhD researcher at PXL-MAD School of Arts, Hasselt.

vaiklastudio.ee/ingel

Katja Novitskova lives and works in Amsterdam. Her work tackles the complexity of depicting the world through technological and cultural mechanisms. By uniting art and science on the level of nature, Novitskova brings awareness to the mediation and representation tools used to depict these realms. Through her use of visual materials found online, AI technologies, and installation she creates works which vacillate between physical and digital domains. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2022); MUDAM Luxembourg (2021); Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2021); Belgrade Biennal (2021); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2020); Sharjah Art Foundation (2020); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2019); Marta Herford Museum, Herford (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn (2018); Baltic Triennial, Vilnius (2018); and the Estonian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017).

katjanovi.net

Katrīna Neiburga’s art is a subject of desire for emotion, authenticity, and memory preservation. One of Neiburga’s main modes of expression is her deeply personal iconography, which shines through in her video installations, performances and scenography. She is interested in sociology and studies preconceived notions of the state of things. Since 2000, she has participated in multiple exhibitions all over the world including Sydney in 2006, Moscow in 2007, Venice in 2015, Kochi-Muziris in 2016 and in the 2018 Riga Biennial. In 2008, she was a finalist for the Ars Fennica award, and received the first Purvītis Award.

neiburga.lv

Kristina Norman is a Tallinn-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes video installations, sculptural objects, urban interventions, as well as documentary films and performances. Norman’s work is devoted to the exploration of the political potential that contemporary art offers in dealing with the issues of human rights and the politics of memory. As part of her academic research on memory and human rights in contemporary art, Norman produced a triad of projects involving site-specific video installations and public interventions, focussing mainly on the use of narrative memories of the protagonists.

kristinanorman.ee

Laura Põld lives and works in Tallinn. Põld is an installation artist whose practice is distinctive for its symbiosis of sculptural and traditional craft, with questions of material and its agency emerging in contemporary art and philosophy. Her large-scale constructions and installations often take over or intervene in a given site and/or its context and material complexity. Her work draws on environmental history, including the behaviour of birds, animals, and plants. Many of her projects have their origins in a residency experience, which allows for immersion in new subjects and consultation with various experts, exploring materials or techniques found on site, and which has developed into long-term collaborations with other artists, writers, musicians, and performance artists. In her most recent works, Põld focuses on the choice of materials and their historical and political context, environmental history, and activism practices. She is currently applying traditional and innovative craft and construction techniques in ceramics, embroidery, tufting, and weaving, the latter of which interests her as a traditionally feminine method of preserving stories, memory, and skills. 

laurapold.com

Lina Lapelytė lives and works in London and Vilnius. Lapelytė’s early work focused mainly on improvised and electronic music. Her more recent performance-based practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes, and nostalgia. Her works engage trained and untrained performers, often in an act of singing through a wide range of genres such as mainstream music and opera. The singing takes the form of a collective and affective event that questions vulnerability and silencing. In 2019, her collaborative work Sun & Sea (Marina), co-produced with Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, and curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale. In 2020, Lapelytė received the national art and culture prize in Lithuania. Lapelytė holds degrees in classical violin and Sound Arts, and an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art, London (2013). Her recent shows include: Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2023); Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2022); Gherdeina Biennial (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); BAM, New York (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels (2021); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); and the Glasgow International (2021).

linalapelyte.com

Maarja Tõnisson is an artist and choreographer based in Tallinn. She has her degree in dance arts from the TU Viljandi Culture Academy and has studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. She has created following solo works: “bodySHIFTbody” (produced by STL, nominated for the Estonian dance award 2015); “bodyBUILDINGbody” (commissioned by Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2015); “bodyIMAGEbody” (at group exhibition “(In)visible dreams and streams” curated by Maija Rudovska, CAC 2016)) and “bodyWORKbody” (at group exhibition “Museum Choreography” curated by Hanna Liis Kont, Tartu Art Museum 2017). She is also part of a performance collective Olmeulmad and has participated in exhibition and performing arts projects. She is currently a master student of Contemporary Arts at Estonian Academy of Arts. In her work she mainly explores physicality and materiality through choreography. She is fascinated by the body as a collage of experiences, perceptions, biological and cultural matters emphasizing the Nature as an integral part of human conditions. In addition to choreography she has interest in visual arts and has created images and videos as part of her works.

Maria Kapajeva lives and works in Tallinn. Kapajeva is an artist whose work often explores a diverse spectrum of cultural identity and gender issues within historical and contemporary contexts. She uses various mediums, such as video, photography, textile, and installations, to bring to the focus what is often left invisible or stays in peripheral vision. Kapajeva’s artist book Dream Is Wonderful, Yet Unclear (Milda Books, 2020) received the Kraszna-Krausz Photo Book Award 2021. Her first book You can call him another man (Kaunas Photography Gallery, 2018) was shortlisted for the Aperture Photobook Award. Kapajeva’s works have been exhibited internationally, including the KUMU Art Museum, Tallinn (2022); F3 freiraum für fotografie, Berlin (2022); Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki (2021); Lithuanian Gallery of Photography, Vilnius (2020); and Tallinn Art Hall (2020). Kapajeva is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at Estonian Academy of Arts.

mariakapajeva.com

Merike Estna lives and works in Tallinn and Mexico City. A participant in the performance art scene associated with Academia Non Grata alternative art school in the early 2000s, Estna later acquired formal art education at the Estonian Academy of Art where she attended painting (BA) and Interdisciplinary Arts (MA) classes. Estna relocated to London in 2007, where she completed an MFA Art Practice degree at Goldsmiths College in 2009. Estna’s practice is primarily focused on the processes of painting, approaching the artwork as an integral part of life rather than it being about life. Borrowing patterns and colour combinations from applied arts and crafts, vocabularies which traditionally have not been accepted in the visual language of painting, her work challenges the masculine territory of painting and questions the strict separation between the two discourses. Initially applying patterns and treatments to canvases, Estna gradually progressed to cover clothes, objects, and entire spaces as her research into colour and acts of painting expanded. Estna’s recent exhibitions include Soil will not contain our love, Kai Art Center, Tallinn (2022) and Nightfall/Videvik, Publics, Helsinki (2021), among others.

merike.estna.com

Pakui Hardware is an artistic duo of Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda who live and work in Vilnius. The duo’s work explores the plasticity of bodies. They trace how diverse technologies expand, test, and control bodily potential. The hybrid materials that the artists employ correspond to hybrid bodies that surround us. These questions are analysed through such examples as invasive and transformative relationship to bodies, automation, synthetic biology, and new materiality. Pakui Hardware has presented solo shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2021); Museum der bildenden Künste (MdbK) Leipzig (2019–2020); MUMOK, Vienna (2016); and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2014); among others. Pakui Hardware participated in group shows at 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019); MAXXI, Rome (2019); 13th Baltic Triennial (2018); and Kunsthalle Basel (2017). Pakui Hardware (with Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė) will represent Lithuania at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

pakuihardware.org

Žilvinas Kempinas is an artist living and working in New York City since 1997. He graduated from the Vilnius Art Academy in 1993 and received his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 2002. Kempinas is known for employing non-traditional materials to create active and dynamic artwork mostly consisting of installations, kinetic or minimalistic sculptures, and optical art. Many of his works employ a signature material—unwound magnetic tape—which affects the viewer through different senses. Kempinas’s use of natural laws, air-fan winds, and gravitation can be perceived as a certain expansion of the field of sculpture. At the same time, his mathematical approach, highlighting the accuracy, detail, and fragility of the objects created, raises questions of poeticism, spatial relationships between viewers and the objects, and the delicate balance between matter and consciousness. 

zilvinaskempinas.com

Viktor Timofeev is an artist based in New York City. Timofeev’s multidisciplinary practice is informed by personal experiences, speculative imaginings, and everything in between. He hosts monthly events that include screenings, performances, and sensory deprivation listening sessions at No Moon, a project space in Brooklyn he co-founded in 2018. He has exhibited at the National Gallery, Prague (2022); 14th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius (2021); Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2020); Bozar, Brussels (2020); and the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga (2020).

viktortimofeev.com

Vytenis Jankūnas is a Lithuanian-American artist who has lived and worked in New York City since 1996. Jankūnas graduated from the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius. He received his MFA and BFA from Vilnius Academy of Arts. His latest work uses mostly photography as a medium for his artistic projects, which include books, photography, and video installations. Recent exhibitions include: Prospekto Gallery, Vilnius (2021); Undercurrent Gallery, New York City (2017); Tallinn Art Hall Gallery (2016); and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2015). In 2020, Jankūnas won first place in the Self Published Books category of the International Photography Awards. He has been a recipient of the Fellowship Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2000, and was awarded a residency in 1995 at Nordic Arts Centre (HIAP), Helsinki.

vytenisjankunas.com