Last autumn, the Season of Lithuania took place in France – a cultural programme organised through a partnership between the two countries, designed to introduce contemporary Lithuanian culture to French audiences in diverse and dynamic forms. Among the featured projects was the contemporary art exhibition ‘Les Frontières sont des animaux nocturnes / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai’. Co-organised by KADIST Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, the exhibition was presented across both Parisian venues. It brought together intergenerational Lithuanian artists and a collective of cultural workers from ‘post-socialist’ countries – some now based in Western Europe and the US. Now, six months after the exhibition in Paris, the project – curated by Neringa Bumblienė and Émilie Villez – is coming to Vilnius and opening on 12 June at the CAC. In this conversation, we speak with the curators about how the exhibition will evolve in its Vilnius iteration, its reception in Paris, and the ideas at its core.
Let’s start from the beginning. Could you elaborate a bit more on the title of the exhibition? What is its meaning, and how does it connect to the overall concept of the project?
E: During our research for the project, we came upon an essay by Luba Jurgenson, a university professor and translator working on the representation of violence in literature, particularly in relation to the history of the ex-USSR and Central Europe. She is of Russian-Estonian origin and based in Paris. When we woke up. The Night of 24 February 2022: Invasion of Ukraine (Verdier, 2023) is a text she wrote shortly after the large-scale invasion began, as a spontaneous and emotional reaction to this violent event. What we can read in this essay is a careful, almost didactic explanation of the chain of events that led to the invasion – a way to contextualise the situation for a French audience, as she puts it. At the same time, it is a very poetic narration of her own personal memories growing up. It powerfully underlines how the 2022 invasion triggered the resurgence of past traumas from the Soviet occupation.
This dual tone resonated strongly with our approach to the exhibition: we felt the need to historicise current events within a complex and recurring history of violence for both French and international audiences. At the same time, we wanted to take a sensitive approach, working our way through materials and atmospheres to convey emotion. I think you sense this directly in the title, which is a quote from the essay. The full sentence reads: ‘Borders are nocturnal animals, they move while we sleep. We should always be vigilant.’
At the moment, the French public is probably more familiar with your project ‘Les Frontières sont des animaux nocturnes / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai’ than the audience in Lithuania. Could you briefly introduce the project for those who might not have heard about it?
E: As we developed the project in the framework of the Lithuanian season, it felt obvious that it should be rooted in the geopolitical turmoil caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine. The conflict has had huge international repercussions, but we wanted to focus on its specific impact on the region, particularly the feeling of history repeating itself. The double exhibition in Paris explored the colonial history of Lithuania and the wider region, in the context of a growing body of decolonial literature on the subject.
Our approach was to evoke these layers of time by inviting several generations of artists, each with different relationships to these historical events: Algirdas Šeškus for instance developed his practice during the Soviet occupation, while Deimantas Narkevičius managed to start an international career as soon as the 1990s when the country re-opened following independence. The younger generation, born after these events, is aware of them primarily through the stories they heard growing up. We also invited the collective ‘Beyond the post-soviet’, whose practice rethinks the vocabulary and narratives specific to the region, in order to broaden the perspectives and voices present in the exhibition. Through them, we included two Ukrainian artists, Anna Zvyagintseva and Danylo Halkin.
The project was on view at KADIST Paris and the Palais de Tokyo for around three months. How was it received by the French public? Are there any particular reactions or feedback that stood out to you?
E: I think that for the French audience, and perhaps some of the international audience, these histories are relatively unknown. In France, decolonial narratives and conversations are currently very present in the cultural field, but they emerged much later than in the Anglo-Saxon world. People tend to forget that this vocabulary is not only related to North/South dialectics. I think the exhibition felt quite relevant to audiences in the current geopolitical context. To me, it revived some conversations that had faded in recent years, but that shaped me early in my curatorial career: for instance the exhibition ‘Les promesses du passé’ at the Centre Pompidou in 2010, which retraced the history of art in the former socialist countries, or the long term project Former West: Art and The Contemporary after 1989, initiated by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst (2013–2016).
N: For me, it wasn’t just the reaction of the French and international audience, but the working process itself that offered so many valuable insights. Collaborating closely with Paris-based curators and institutions, and having deep conversations and exchanges, helped me better understand my own background and see it from a much wider perspective. It also taught me how to find my own voice – to tell my story, and that of my country and region. I told my friends that I had never spoken so much about Lithuania and what actually happened here. And it felt important to do that, especially now, in such a tense geopolitical moment. The fact that these conversations resulted in two exhibitions held simultaneously at major Parisian institutions amplified our voices much wider.
As I understand, the project will differ from the one shown in Paris. How does it shift in the Lithuanian version?
E: The project in Paris was largely focused on Lithuanian artists and the regional context, for various reasons but especially to highlight the current climate. We felt that bringing the exhibition back to Lithuania would be more challenging and interesting for the local audience if we widened the historic and geographic scope to create a dialogue between different decolonial narratives. We started from the newly produced works by the artists we had collaborated with in Paris and created thematic and formal dialogues with works from very different contexts, such as Southeast Asia or Latin America, thanks to the international resource that is the KADIST collection. It was made available to us by KADIST, our partner from the very beginning of this project. The topics covered in the exhibition are all intertwined: energy resources and extractivism in relation to geopolitics, shifting borders, scars left by war on landscapes and people’s memories, resilience through cultural identity and pre-modern rituals.
N: Yes, it’s important to note that this exhibition is an entirely new entity. It started in Paris, but here it has grown into a much larger and more geographically wide-reaching organism. We kept the same list of artists from the Paris exhibitions as a core group, and then added twice as many new names to it. Speaking about this core group, we carefully revisited their works, and some Lithuanian artists are showing pieces in Vilnius which were not presented previously in Paris, such as Algirdas Šeškus and Andrius Arutiunian.
This exhibition will be the main show of the Contemporary Art Centre’s summer programme, taking place in the Main Hall, North Hall, and the CAC Cinema Hall. Of course, every artwork in the exhibition is important, but could you highlight a few pieces that you feel especially shouldn’t be missed?
E: I’m particularly excited by the connections established between the works. Some are very direct, such as the use of maps in the works of the Urbonas Studio and Louisa Bufardeci. Yet, in their form, they point to different ways of representing the world, according to different contexts. Urbonas Studio’s sticky, tar-like map is a reproduction of a 19th-century map caricaturing the power relations at play in Europe and Central Asia, where nations are portrayed according to their folkloric history and ‘personalities’. In contrast, Bufardeci’s map is a data visualisation of the world’s populations, regularly updated – offering another way to represent shifting relations and geopolitics.
There are also works that will be interpreted differently depending on the context. The audio archive compiled by the collective Beyond the post-soviet brings together texts, songs and reflections by a diverse group of people – cultural workers, thinkers, and writers from different geographic and social backgrounds – responding in their own languages to the question: ‘How can we be next to each other?’ The installation reflects on how distance and borders affect individuals and communities.
N: For me, working on this second chapter, it was very exciting – and even soothing – to find so many connections between colonial histories (and realities) of our country, the wider region, and those of other geographies. In this exhibition, we are not simply inspecting the painful and damaging events of the past – though acknowledging them and paying respect is an important step – we also look for ways of survival and resistance. Nature is a recurring theme here, both as a source of strength, inspiration and ancestral knowledge, and as a battleground and witness, bearing persistent scars. Many works in the exhibition relate to this in one way or another. I would mention Herbaria, a sculpture by Emilija Škarnulytė, commissioned for the exhibition in Paris. Škarnulytė uses medicinal plants collected along the tense Lithuanian-Belarusian border, i.e. the eastern NATO border, in the vicinity of the notorious Astravets Nuclear Power Plant. There is also a work by Costa Rican artist Christian Salablanca, who also uses medicinal plants collected in another part of the world. Sandra Monterroso employs natural dyes and ancestral knowledge. When it comes to landscapes, it’s important to mention Cambodian artist Vandy Ratana, who documents ponds formed in bomb craters in his photographs, and the traces of war left in Laotian forests in Pratchaya Phinthong’s film. Andrius Arutiunian meditates on the Armenian landscape, framed by its complex mining histories.
This project brings together artists from different countries and is being presented internationally – first in France, now in Lithuania – reaching a wide audience. What lasting impact do you hope the exhibition will have on viewers, particularly in terms of understanding complex histories and imagining future narratives?
N: I hope this exhibition will help us better understand ourselves and the world around us. That it will encourage us to speak and share our stories confidently and freely – even the most painful ones – healing us and teaching us how to find ways forward, even in the most challenging moments and situations.