- Riparia
- Hypoxia
- Penumbra, Fondazione in Between Art Film, 2022
- Chambers of Radiance, Radvila Palace Museum of Art, 2022
- Eternal Return, Tate Modern, 2021
- t 1/2, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, 2021
- Sunken Cities, Kunsthaus Pasquart, 2021
- Circular Time. For Aleksandra Kasuba, National Gallery of Art, 2021
- Chambers of Radiance, The PinchukArtCentre, 2020
- Screen City Biennial, 2019
Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987) is a Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker. Working between documentary and imaginary realms, Škarnulytė makes films, installations, sculptures, drawings, and immersive time-based media that explore the entanglement of the human, the ecological, and the cosmic. Her work inhabits deep time, spanning geological epochs, submarine architectures, and post-anthropocentric futures to examine human and non-human histories. 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. Inhabiting a future archeologist‘s perspective, the artist suggests that the worlds we imagine to be science fiction or fantasy are already to be found on our own planet. By combining poetic and analytic visual languages, Škarnulytė examines how infrastructures of power—military, ecological, and mythological—extend into unseen and unknowable territories of oceanic abyss, cosmic matter, and memory.
Škarnulytė has presented her work in major solo exhibitions, including at Tate St Ives (UK), Kunsthaus Graz (AT), Kunsthall Trondheim (NO), and Canal Projects (US). She has exhibited in numerous international group exhibitions, including at MoMA PS1 (US), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), Mori Art Museum (JP), and Kiasma (FI), and has participated in the Gwangju Biennale (KR), Helsinki Biennale (FI), Vilnius Biennale (LT), and the Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media (NO). She represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano (IT) and in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. She is the recipient of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and the 2023 Ars Fennica Award.
Škarnulytė studied sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan (IT) and holds an MA from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art (NO). She founded and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø (NO) and is a member of the artist duo New Mineral Collective, together with Tanya Busse.
All intellectual property rights, including copyright, trademark, and database rights, in the content of emilijaskarnulyte.com (including text, images, and photographs) are owned by Emilija Škarnulytė. No content may be reproduced, distributed, or made available in any form without prior written permission from Emilija Škarnulytė.
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Laser and sound / duration 7 min / 2021 / at the 13th Kaunas Biennial
Sound: Jokūbas Čižikas
It was a Deep Time. I was born in the dark. I grew up surrounded by wet stalactites and stalagmites. The sweaty water scrolled over our bodies, continuously. There were echoes. I knew all of my neighbours – from the times when the tectonic plates made love and the tropical palm forest was becoming a temple of fossilised columns. I have never seen that forest, because I was living in the dark.
Once, during that whole Deep Time, golden shadows wandered over my skin. I saw torches made from canes, growing outside the cave. Each stick burned fast. An artificial warmth, never experienced before, was slowly covering my skin in ash. Creatures wrapped in wool were sliding on their knees, passing under my hips, crossing my elbows, touching my neck violently with their cold and moist hands.
There was a lot of smoke. They were scratching my skin with coal and clay. It did not bother me much. And soon they left. Only to later return. Covered in metal shells and acting differently this time.
They cut my skin and took samples. A cold wind began to circulate in my tiny open wounds. They measured me. According to their parameters I can grow ten centimetres within one thousand of their years. I know what it all means. I have lived through it from the moment they exposed my parts to daylight. I watched their rituals. I was their roof, their bed, their bath, their slave and their protector. A cultural stratum was accumulating on my scars, like a tissue. Look, look the dust is growing! I am the child of tectonic plates, erupted with speed and satisfaction. I am also a flow of lava.
