Emilija Škarnulytė
Index

Emilija Škarnulytė (b. Vilnius, Lithuania 1987) is an artist and filmmaker.

Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Her blind grandmother gently touches the weathered statue of a Soviet dictator. Neutrino detectors and particular colliders measure the cosmos with otherworldly architecture. Post-human species swim through submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle and crawl through tectonic fault lines in the Middle Eastern desert.

Winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulytė represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano and was included in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture. With solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (2021), Kunsthaus Pasquart (2021), Den Frie (2021), National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2021), CAC (2015) and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (2017), she has participated in group shows at Ballroom Marfa, Seoul Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, and the First Riga Biennial. In 2022, Škarnulytė participated in the group exhibition Penumbra organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale. Her numerous prizes include the Kino der Kunst Project Award, Munich (2017); Spare Bank Foundation DNB Artist Award (2017), and the National Lithuanian Art Prize for Young Artists (2016)), and she was nominated as the candidate for the Ars Fennica art award 2023. She received an undergraduate degree from the Brera Academy of Art in Milan and holds a masters from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art.

Her films are in the IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou collections and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, UK, Centre Pompidou, France, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in numerous film festivals including in Rotterdam, Busan, and Oberhausen. Most recently she concluded her tenures at Art Explora and Cite des Art, which occurred on the heels of another significant residency at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. She is a founder and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective, recently commissioned for a new work by the First Toronto Biennial.

Contact: skarnulyte.emilija@gmail.com

Circular Time. For Aleksandra Kasuba, National Gallery of Art, 2021

National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania

2021 03 26 – 06 05

The National Gallery of Art presented a solo exhibition by Emilija Škarnulytė and her latest audiovisual installation ‘Circular Time. For Aleksandra Kasuba’. The idea of the work was inspired by Škarnulytė’s personal acquaintance with the prominent American artist and architect of Lithuanian origin Aleksandra Kasuba and her creative legacy. In 2018 encouraged by her mother, also an architect, Rita Škarnulienė, Emilija for the first time visited Rock Hill residence and Shell Dwellings designed by Kasuba in New Mexico. The same year Emilija established contact with Kasuba and visited her in Albuquerque. It was both artists’ common interests in connections between art and science, in achievements in astronomy, quantum physics and other branches of natural science that helped establish remarkable acquaintance between representatives of two generations. This remarkable acquaintance was a huge inspiration to E. Škanulytė who decided to pay homage to it in her l test work of art.

Curator Candice Hopkins
Architect Linas Lapinskas

The Project was financed by The Lithuanian Council for Culture
Sponsors: Exterus, Fundermax

National Gallery of Art, Vilnius