Following its first iteration, presented simultaneously at KADIST Paris and the Palais de Tokyo in autumn 2024, the second chapter of the exhibition ‘Borders are Nocturnal Animals / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai’ will take place this summer at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius.
Rooted in the geopolitical turmoil caused by the Russian war in Ukraine, the exhibition weaves threads between artworks included in the initial exhibitions in Paris and an extensive selection of artworks from the KADIST Collection. In this iteration, curators Neringa Bumblienė (CAC Vilnius) & Émilie Villez (KADIST advisor) will explore the regional colonial histories of Lithuania and beyond within a broader international framework, touching on issues including war scars, extractivism, ancestral healing, surveillance systems and diverse forms of individual and collective resilience.
CURATORIAL TEAM
NERINGA BUMBLIENĖ is a curator and writer whose work engages with contemporary art practices that sensitively reflect upon today’s global challenges while helping to imagine better futures. Often working on projects that involve new commissions, she invites artists into situations that stretch beyond their usual realm of practice.
Bumblienė is the artistic director and curator of the Vilnius Biennial of Performance Art, which held its inaugural edition in 2023. She curated the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia in 2022 and has worked as a curator at the CAC in Vilnius since 2014. Her curatorial projects span large-scale international group exhibitions and performance festivals – including co-curating ’Borders Are Nocturnal Animals’ at the Palais de Tokyo and KADIST in Paris in 2024, and Baltic Triennial 13 in 2018 – as well as solo presentations of emerging and established artists, including Augustas Serapinas in 2025, Robertas Narkus in 2023, 2022 and 2020, Pierre Huyghe in 2022, Michael Rakowitz in 2020, Alejandro Cesarco in 2019, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané in 2018, Liam Gillick in 2017 and 2014, among others.
ÉMILIE VILLEZ is a Paris-based curator whose practice focuses on artistic and curatorial methodologies and the construction of institutions and institutional ecosystems. With decentralisation as a guiding principle, she looks to create relationships between artists of different generations and geographies to find new ways of apprehending the contemporary world.
In 2024, she curated ‘Des lignes de désir’, an exhibition featuring 28 graduates from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris whose work had been commended by that year’s jury. Together with Neringa Bumblienė, she co-curated ‘Borders are Nocturnal Animals’ at the Palais de Tokyo and at KADIST in Paris as part of the Saison de la Lituanie.