Songs of Serpents from Nida

We are pleased to invite you to the next online expert dialogue which will take place on 18^th December at 6 pm CET as part of the artistic research and exchange project “Songs of Serpents – Ecopoetic Zones”, hosted by Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania and curated by its director Neringa Bumblienė.

The event will encompass an artist talk by Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė and a lecture on the visionary work and legacy of Lithuanian American artist and architect Aleksandra Kasuba, narrated by Vilnius based art historian and curator Inesa Brašiškė.

Working between documentary and imaginary realms, Škarnulytė (b. 1987) makes films, installations, sculptures, drawings, and immersive time-based media. By combining poetic and analytic visual languages, she examines how infrastructures of power—military, ecological, and mythological—extend into unseen and unknowable territories of oceanic abyss, cosmic matter, and memory. In her videos, viewers often encounter extreme or inaccessible environments: decommissioned nuclear power plants, deep-sea data storage, abandoned and forgotten underwater cities, endless desert landscapes, and uncanny natural phenomena.

In her lecture, Inesa Brašiškė will examine Aleksandra Kasuba’s (1923–2019) spatial installations and architectural designs, both built and unrealized, through feminist and ecocritical lenses. She will pay particular attention to the material features of Kasuba’s works, especially their tensile and opaque qualities, while situating them within the artistic practices of her time and tracing the legacy and reception of Kasuba’s work in contemporary art.

Link to the event >>

“Songs of Serpents” establishes a transnational platform for networking and knowledge exchange with residency partners in Albania, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, and Ukraine. It connects local perspectives and initiatives and enables new artistic projects at the interface of art, ecology, and ecofeminism(s). Each participating location features historically, mythically, and politically charged landscapes with their own local characteristics as well as ecological and political realities.

Partners: 
Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, Italy
Gallery of the Coast – Center for Changing Landscapes, Albania
Khata-Maysternya residency, Ukraine
Künstlerhäuser Worpswede (KHW), Germany
Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania
Villa Serpentara of the Akademie der Künste, Germany

The project is funded by and developed with Schering Stiftung(main partner), the Stiftung Stark für Gegenwartskunst and the Landschaftsverband Stade.

The event will be held in English.