- 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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Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, Italy
2022 04 20 – 11 27
Penumbra is a group exhibition curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi that feature eight new video and filmic installations commissioned to Karimah Ashadu, Jonathas de Andrade, Aziz Hazara, He Xiangyu, Masbedo (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni), James Richards, Emilija Škarnulytė, and Ana Vaz, and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film.
Taking inspiration from the rarefied atmosphere of Venice and from the hybrid architecture of the Ospedaletto and the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti, Penumbra is conceived as a stage where images, sounds, and the set design are in reciprocal dialogue with the architecture and its history, and explores moving images as a site of material and metaphorical transformation. The concept of “penumbra” is addressed on two levels: in material terms, the absence of light is the necessary condition for making moving images visible; in metaphorical terms, semi-darkness is interpreted as a threshold or place of transition within which the contours and appearance of things blur together. Understood as the space we inhabit as much at nightfall as at dawn, semi-darkness redefines the distinction between true and false, historical memory and personal specters, the reality of bodies and their social representations, the human subject and the subjugated environment. Through a diversity of languages ranging from narrative approaches to visual and sound experimentations, moving images stand here as a multi-faceted medium to speak of a world that is global, fragmented and in continuous metamorphosis.
Presented within a sequence of areas of darkness and light, the works echo the transformations that the venue faced throughout the centuries, following its foundation in the 16th century as a hospital for the needy. The exhibition design by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and his studio 2050+ reflects on the history of the location and spatialize the curatorial concept by looking at the interconnected notions of human and architectural anatomy.
