- 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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Personal Immersive exhibition at Tate St Ives / 6 December 2025 – 12 April 2026
In the winter of 2025, Tate St Ives presented a major exhibition of the work of Lithuanian-born artist Emilija Škarnulytė. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė creates films and immersive installations that explore deep time and invisible systems, as well as power structures hidden within the cosmic and geological order. In her explorations of climate change, nuclear energy, fantasy, folklore and mythology, Škarnulytė’s work covers the poetic, personal and political.
From the perspective of a ‘future archaeologist’, Škarnulytė traverses spaces that we do not readily see, such as Cold War military bases, mining sites, neutrino observatories, decommissioned power plants and deep-sea data storage units. She reveals them to us as relics of a lost human culture, in which technological advancements have wrought a complex future laden with environmental harm and human losses. At times, Škarnulytė positions herself in some of her films as a hybrid, almost mythical creature, swimming through various bodies of water. Other works reflect on ‘dead zones’ in the sea, caused by a lack of oxygen, whether from industrial processes, or the effects of climate change.
Škarnulytė spent the month of June 2025 at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, as part of a Tate St Ives artist residency programme, where she worked on a new 16mm film, Telstar (2025). Drawing on the large number of fabled and ancient locations in Cornwall, she visited the Dry Tree, a standing stone near Goonhilly Downs, the ‘Cornish Pyramid’ in St Austell, Mên-an-Tol, the Boskednan Stone Circle and Chun Quoit, as well as the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station; taking her across a spectrum of time from the Neolithic Period to the space age.
This exhibition at Tate St Ives presented Škarnulytė’s work in large-scale immersive environments. The architectural structures in the gallery will invite visitors to view the films from a series of different perspectives and at different scales, from the macro to the micro, alongside glass sculptures and lightboxes, showcasing the breadth of Škarnulytė’s practice, and bringing to the fore her visions of how mythology and technology can form a vibrant and transcendental force.
