Lithuania may be a small country, but it has big ambitions when it comes to art. The Baltic state wants to position itself as the capital of performance art with a new biennale. The first edition of the Vilnius Performance Art Biennale will take place this summer, with the capital hosting up to 40 performances in public spaces ranging from parks and squares to tennis courts and cultural venues.
An open call for performance artists prompted 300 applications worldwide, ten of which were chosen by an international jury. Eight other artists, who have not yet been named, have been chosen by the curators. The aim is to create site-specific performances related to the theme of the city. “I decided to focus on the city as a human construct,” says artistic director Neringa Bumblienė, “a place where different stories, myths, activities, interests, desires and visions overlap, coexist and collide.”
Until Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, most contemporary art took place underground without any institutional support. The arts and literature under communism served as a useful outlet for political dissent, but they had to be inventive to avoid the attention of censors. “We have a history of performance art dating back to the 1970s,” says Lolita Jablonskiene, director of the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. “It was often illegal actions in public spaces that were only seen by about a dozen friends, but they documented them.” Once the Soviet yoke is lifted, an explosion of creativity ensues, giving rise to a dynamic and experimental art scene.
The idea of organizing a biennale dedicated to performance art was born after Lithuania won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2019 with Sun & Sea (Marina), a lyrical art installation located on an artificial beach. With the audience watching from above, 25 performers in bathing suits lay down on chairs and towels while singing. Composed by three female artists, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, the lyrics gently reflect on the pollution of our seas and climate change. The 60-minute performance, which took place on an eight-hour loop, drew long queues around the Lithuanian pavilion and then embarked on a successful world tour.
Women artists reflecting on the fate of our oceans turn out to be a bit of a recurring theme in Lithuanian performance art. One of the country’s best-known artists and filmmakers is Emilija Škarnulytė, who learned scuba diving and freediving while studying in the Norwegian city of Tromsø in the Arctic Circle. She began collaborating with marine biologists, making lakes, rivers and oceans a theme in her work. Most of his films involve the artist swimming in a mermaid costume and then filming himself in the water using drones. It’s about linking the real world to the classical, mythological world.
For the launch of the biennale, Škarnulytė was entrusted with the management of the National Theater of Opera and Ballet of Lithuania, a remarkable modernist building with a huge glass atrium. Using lights, lasers and large-format video projections with specially choreographed sound (including a live choir dressed in black balaclavas), she transformed the entire building into a fascinating underwater world with chandeliers resembling huge jellyfish floating overhead. The video footage was shot from a submarine 4km deep in the heavily polluted Gulf of Mexico, capturing both marine life and man-made debris. CGI footage of crumbling buildings hinted at a speculative future where rising waters submerged coastal towns.
The next day, I meet the 36-year-old artist at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius, where she has another installation that will run throughout 2023. I lie down in the dark next to her on a chair long, looking at footage of Škarnulytė plunging into the cold, black waters around a disused Cold War submarine base in Norway. “It was super dangerous,” she laughs as she looks at herself. “I could have hypothermia. Looking back, I’m scared. I could have done it in post-production but the place was important”. She sees her films as archaeological expeditions into the future, “to inaccessible places where there are no humans; only their artefacts remain”.
Škarnulytė’s next project involves filming in the Baltic Sea, one of the deadliest oceans in the world, filled with Cold War debris and nuclear waste. “Here in the Baltic countries, geopolitics is always very present, especially at the moment with the war in Ukraine, which is not far away,” she says. “In this way, I see myself a bit like a journalist or a documentary filmmaker, making the invisible visible.”
