June is recognised around the world as LGBTQ+ Pride Month, a time dedicated to promoting respect for human rights and equality. This year, members of the community in Lithuania are organising Lithuanian Pride, which will take place from 2 to 6 June. In support of the values highlighted during this month, the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) and the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association (LTMKS) have prepared a one-evening programme of events, ‘CAC x LTMKS Pride Week’, which will take place on 5 June.
The event will take place at CAC (Vokiečių g. 2, Vilnius) and will begin at 6 pm with a screening of J. Jackie Baier’s film ‘Julia’, followed by performances by Agnė Jokšė and Filipka Rutkowska. The evening’s programme invites audiences to reflect on trans and queer experiences, visibility, social exclusion, migration, memory and the right to be oneself.
All events are free of charge, but capacity is limited. Visitors are encouraged to arrive early, as admission will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis.
PROGRAMME:
18:00 | Screening of ‘Julia’
‘Julia’ is a story of uprootedness and belonging, self-discovery and rage. What would drive a boy from art school to leave his home in Klaipėda , and end up as a girl selling her body in the streets of Berlin, in sweaty back rooms and on the sticky seats of a porn cinema? For more than ten years, photographer and filmmaker J. Jackie Baier follows transgender Julia K. from Klaipėda through her uncompromising life as a sex worker, outlaw and nonconformist.
Written and directed by J. Jackie Baier
The film is in German with Lithuanian subtitles.
Duration: 89 min.
JACKIE BAIER is a photographer and a filmmaker. Since the early 1990s, she has worked as a director of television series and independent short films and documentaries. Since 1999, she has placed increasing emphasis on her freelance photography practice. Baier lives and works in Berlin
20:00 | Agnė Jokšė’s performance, ‘Wants What’s Missing’
‘Wants What’s Missing’ is a text-based performance-letter addressed to Julia Krivickas, a woman from Klaipėda who lived in Berlin. Through Julia’s personal and collective memory, the work speaks about trans visibility, social exclusion and survival in contemporary Lithuania. In the text, Klaipėda emerges as a space filled with invisible queer experiences and histories of desire, migration and vulnerability. The reading performance brings together autobiographical testimony, urban memory and political critique, addressing the right to be oneself in the face of insecurity, stigma and systemic dehumanisation. Here, Julia’s figure becomes not only an individual story, but also a symbol of resistance, fragile freedom and unrealised potential.
The performance will be in Lithuanian and English.
AGNĖ JOKŠĖ is an artist based in Vilnius whose practice brings together video, text, performance and research into language. Drawing on autoethnography and narratives of collective memory, Jokšė explores themes of love, intimacy, friendship and queer experience.
20:30 | Filipka Rutkowska’s performance, ‘The Iron Lipstick’
‘The Iron Lipstick’ is a performance combining spoken word and choreography, in which Margaret Thatcher is embodied and reimagined as a queer spectre, despite her anti-gay politics. Inspired by Damian Barr’s memoir ‘Maggie and Me’, a queer coming-of-age story set in 1980s Scotland, the work reanimates Thatcher’s iconic speeches to create a political fiction that calls for the abolition of gender in order to imagine a genderless society. Thatcher becomes a costume to be destabilised, multiplied, and re-performed: domination is recast as drag, and power is dismantled through performance. By queering a figure synonymous with oppression, the piece stages a paradoxical intimacy with history’s demons, exposing how they resurface today while opening the possibility of taming and transforming them. The performance incorporates a replica of Thatcher’s costume, recently displayed at a Christie’s auction.
The performance will be in English.
FILIPKA RUTKOWSKA uses her own identity as an artistic medium. S/he explores multiple dimensions of otherness, weaving them into personal history. Moving fluidly across performance, film, theatre, and literature, s/he addresses socially and emotionally complex topics in a language that is light, accessible, and often infused with humour. Her practice connects two key currents that have profoundly shaped contemporary Polish art: critical art and queer performance. As a long-time assistant to Paweł Althamer, Rutkowska understands art as a collision between the shared and the intimate – a space where queerness functions both as a strategy for escaping rigid identity and bodily limits, and as a manifesto for social change.
21:00 | End of the events, with the evening continuing in the CAC café.
Photography and/or filming may take place at the event. Please note that you may appear in photos and/or videos of the event that are subsequently published on social media, websites or other promotional materials.