

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.


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Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom
2021 10 29 – 10 31
Emilija Škarnulytė conceived the installation for Tate Modern’s South Tank to mark COP26 (the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference, taking place this year in Glasgow). Set 10,000 years in the future, looking into the past (our present), the artist dives into deep time, from the cosmic and geological, to the ecological and political.
The artist based the work on mapping technologies, such as sonar, remote sensing and seafloor scanning, and set out to explore structures in the depths of the sea. These include Baia, an ancient Roman city now under water due to seismic activity in the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Mexico, where laboratory-bred corals are used to restore the ecosystems damaged in consecutive oil spills, among other sites.
Dressed as a mermaid, the artist freedives in an attempt to measure space and time, using her own body as a scale. Reflecting upon Škarnulytė’s work, the poet Quinn Latimer encourages us to ‘hold our breath. Drop. Dive. Open our eyes. Leave our body at the surface. We are now all eye, like a drill; all tail, like a fish.’
Curators Valentine Umansky and Katy Wan
Organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor.
