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.

Emilija Škarnulytė skarnulyte.emilija@gmail.com

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Stay inspired and keep up to date with the latest news, exhibitions and projects

currently:

Solo Exhibition - Emilija Škarnulytė at Tate St Ives, 6 December - 12 April 2026
Group Exhibition - The New Orchestra, Museo della Montagna (TO), 31 October 2025 - 31 May 2026

upcoming:

Solo exhibition - Lokremise, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (CH), August 22 – November 8, 2026
t 1/2, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, 2021

Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark

2021 09 12 – 11 14

Emilija Škarnulytės impressive video installation, t 1/2, is an artistic suggestion of the imprints our ideological constructions and massive, scientific structures leaves on earth in a posthuman age. t 1/2 is now shown for the first time in Denmark.

The video installation t 1/2 is made up of the artist’s own camera footage, amongst other from a nuclear power plant, Etruscan tomb monuments, a neutrino observatory and a submarine base from the Cold War. The title of the work comes from physics where t 1/2 denotes the half-life of a nuclear particle. The documentary footage is superimposed or made ambiguous via different layers of fiction and mythological elements. The work draws a vision of our world, seen from a future, archaeological perspective.

An immersive multi-sensory performance Sensory Remote Seabed was prepared for the opening of the exhibition.

Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art