The exhibition ‘Gatherings’ brings together works by artist and composer Lina Lapelytė made at different periods in her practice, presenting them in a single space for the first time. Its title also points to the importance of togetherness and a sense of community in her work. How might our relationships with one another change if we listened more closely to those around us and to our surroundings, and viewed our everyday rituals, rules and coincidences through a poetic lens? Lapelytė explores the relationship between voice, music, performance and listening, while also experimenting with different spatial situations.
Many of the works in the exhibition draw on musical traditions, which become a pretext for destabilising established rules – both within music and beyond it. Lapelytė invites those who, in the conventional sense, ‘have no ear for music’ to sing. She gives arias originally written for castrati to women with particularly low voices, reworks ‘dirty rap’ hits, and dreams of recording a pop song with monks. In this way, she asks whose voices we hear, and whose we do not – or choose not to listen to – both in music and, more broadly, in society. Perhaps, too, she asks what harmony is, and who gets to set its rules.
Against the bright mood of the works, a minor key resounds insistently, reminding us that something is fundamentally off in today’s world – whoever’s rules may have shaped it or whatever chances may have brought it into being. Lapelytė transposes the religious hymn ‘Dies irae’ (‘Day of Wrath’), which tells of the Day of Judgement, into the present day: contrary to what the hymn proclaims, the world is not perishing in a single climactic moment, but slowly, before our very eyes. In the piece Speech, not a single word of human speech is heard: instead, it is performed in other, non-human languages, drawing attention to humanity’s relationship with animals and nature more broadly.
Interconnectedness, ageing, vulnerability and loss are recurring themes in Lapelytė’s work, in which the personal and political are closely intertwined. The artist’s work is deeply aligned with composer Pauline Oliveros’s concept of active, or deep, listening, which places responsibility on the listener for what and whom they listen to, and how they listen. Both Oliveros’s and Lapelytė’s work and ideas extend into the fields of feminism and ecology. Both shift the focus away from virtuosity towards the voice as primarily an instrument of communication.
In the exhibition, the question of ‘with whom’ is answered anew with each work: most of Lapelytė’s projects are created through direct collaboration with other artists or by incorporating texts by various writers, poets and artists. Each time the works are presented to the public, the question of ‘when’ also becomes significant. Works created between 2011 and 2015, which question gender dynamics, are being presented again in 2026, prompting us to ask whether we are living in the future we imagined.
Much of Lina Lapelytė’s work takes the form of performance. In this exhibition, the works are presented through sound and objects, creating new relationships with space and time. At the heart of the exhibition are Lapelytė’s songs and sound compositions, shifting dynamically through the space.
– Virginija Januškevičiūtė, Aistė Liuka Jonynaitė
LINA LAPELYTĖ is among the most prominent contemporary artists of her generation internationally. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, she represented Lithuania together with Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė. Their collaborative opera-performance Sun & Sea received the Golden Lion, one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary art, and has since been staged in more than 30 countries. The New York Times named it one of the best artworks of 2019, and in 2025, Frieze magazine listed it among the 25 artworks that have shaped contemporary art in the 21st century.
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).
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.