Open Call: Portfolio Reviews

AISTĖ LIUKA JONYNAITĖ is an art historian and curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) who holds a Master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. There, she studied Global Conceptualism under Professor Sarah Wilson, in a course designed by the art critic and media theorist Boris Groys. While in London, Aistė Liuka worked at Alison Jacques, where, among other projects, she contributed to an exhibition by Veronica Ryan, a British artist of the Windrush generation who received the Turner Prize that same year. In 2023, Aistė Liuka was a Curatorial Fellow at the Performa Biennial in New York, where she worked with artists including Haegue Yang and Franz Erhard Walther, and in 2025 she was part of the Performa curatorial team working on the ‘Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls’.

At the Contemporary Art Centre, Aistė Liuka has co-curated Lina Lapelytė’s solo exhibition and ‘Perform, Inform, Transform: Participatory Performance in Art Museums’ (PIT), both together with Virginija Januškevičiūtė.

EDGARAS GERASIMOVIČIUS is an art historian, curator, Head of the Art Programme at the Contemporary Art Centre’s Sapieha Palace and a PhD student in Art History at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Gerasimovičius’ main interests include the relationship between art and technology, and theories of labour. Recent group exhibitions he has curated and co-curated include ‘Housekeeping in a Dangerous Time’ (2026), ‘Breaking the Joints’ (2025), ‘Exit Elephantine’ (2024), ‘Refuge’ (2024), ‘How I Walked Into the Room Through the Door’ by Laura Kaminskaitė and Ona Juciūtė (2023), and ‘In the Beginning Was the Deed!’ (2023).

EDVARDAS ŠUMILA is a writer and curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC). He trained as a pianist and then as a musicologist at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, where he now teaches; in 2013 he founded AHEAD, a festival for electronic sound practices, and went on to direct the contemporary music festival Druskomanija (2015–2018). Since 2023, he has been a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) Vilnius, where his projects include Piotr Bury Łakomy’s ‘Garden Exit’ (2025), the Jonas Mekas–Verdi ‘Requiem’ (2024), realised with the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre and the Centre Pompidou, and the film programme ‘Different Will: The Films of Palestine’ (2023). He is completing a doctorate in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, where his dissertation concerns the political commitment of art in a time of permanent crisis. His writing has appeared in e-flux Notes, Glissando, Echo Gone Wrong, and other outlets, and the issue of Escape as a Journal, which he guest-edited on M. K. Čiurlionis for the Lithuanian Culture Institute, received an Art Criticism Award in 2026.

INESA BRAŠIŠKĖ is an art historian and curator at the Contemporary Art Centre’s Sapieha Palace working on Baltic and Eastern European modern and contemporary art, experimental film, and the moving image. Recent and forthcoming projects include ‘Eva Koťátková: Interview with a Monster’ (2025), ‘Eyes and Fields: Kazimiera Zimblytė and Rose Lowder’ (2025), a retrospective of Aurelija Maknytė (2026), and the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to the avant-garde filmmaker and artist Marie Menken (2027). She is currently a curator at the Sapieha Palace, a branch of the Contemporary Art Centre, where she organises exhibitions and events, including the annual international Sapieha Palace symposium. Her texts have appeared in a range of publications and magazines, among them Mousse Magazine, MoMA’s C-MAP post, and CAA News. Brašiškė has curated exhibitions and film programmes at the Contemporary Art Centre, the National Gallery of Art, MO Museum, the e-flux Screening Room, Art in General, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She is an Associate Researcher at Bryn Mawr College (2025–2027) and a member of the ARTMargins Online Working and Advisory Collective.

POVILAS GUMBIS is a curator and art historian working at the Sapieha Palace branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC). He graduated with a BA in Art History from the University of Essex and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He curated the group exhibition ‘Housekeeping in a Dangerous Time’ (2026; co-curated with Inesa Brašiškė and Edgaras Gerasimovičius), solo exhibitions by Mykolas Valantinas (2025), Lin May Saeed (2025) and Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas (2024), as well as the 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions of the international film exhibition ‘Artists’ Film International’.

VALENTINAS KLIMAŠAUSKAS – director of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), curator, and writer. Among his major international projects are: the 1st Klaipėda Biennial ‘Sunset Every Two Years’(2025); the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with João Laia; artists: Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė; Lithuanian National Museum of Art, 2024); the contemporary art festival ‘Coast Contemporary’ in the Lofoten Islands, Norway (2023); the 14th Baltic Triennial ‘The Endless Battle’ (co-curated with João Laia, CAC Vilnius, 2021); a choreographic project by Alexandra Pirici at the Ninth Fort Memorial in Kaunas (2020); and the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with Inga Lāce; Daiga Grantina’s solo exhibition ‘Saules Suns’, 2019).

In 2024, Klimašauskas published his English-language book Telebodies. Bleeding Subtitles for Postrobotic Scenes (Mousse Publishing, Milan), based on his doctoral dissertation in art at Vilnius Academy of Arts. He is also the author of the books Daugiakampis (Six Chairs Books, Kaunas, 2018), Oh, My Darling and Other Texts (The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt, Vilnius, 2018), and Alfavilnius (Kitos Knygos, Vilnius, 2008).

His texts have been published in A Prior Magazine, As a Journal, Beyond, Cura, Dot Dot Dot, Flash Institut, Flash Art, Kim Docs, Kunstnernes Hus, Good Times & Nocturnal News, Šiaurės Atėnai, ŠMC Interview, Metropolis M, Mousse, Nero, Paletten, Spike, and others.

VIRGINIJA JANUŠKEVIČIŪTĖ – Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC). Among her most significant recent group exhibitions are the first annual Sapieha Palace exhibition ‘Refuge’ (co-curated with Edgaras Gerasimovičius, 2024), ‘Splitting the Atom’ (with Ele Carpenter, 2020), ‘An Architect Without Architecture? A Retrospective of Valdas Ozarinskas’ (2018), and the 12th Baltic Triennial (2015).

Since 2013, she has curated solo exhibitions and projects by Gintaras Didžiapetris, Melvin Moti, Darius Žiūra, Eglė Budvytytė, Antanas Gerlikas, Robertas Narkus, Algirdas Šeškus, Elena Narbutaitė, Malvina Jelinskaitė, Michael Portnoy, Brud, Yuji Agematsu, Arthur Jafa, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Anastasija Sosunova, most of which took place at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius.

Her major publishing projects include the forthcoming books Aspects of Presence, the catalogue of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, and a monograph dedicated to the artist Anastasija Sosunova, as well as the already published Refuge (co-edited with Edgaras Gerasimovičius) and the 12th Baltic Triennial publishing programme, which featured books and a guide produced by Dexter Sinister, Erik Thys, Kristupas Sabolius, Marcos Lutyens, Deimantas Narkevičius, and Elena Narbutaitė. She is also one of the initiators and organisers of the Visual Art Criticism Awards and a member of the Lithuanian section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).