What to see in the Baltics
Must-see art exhibitions in March-April, 2025
Spring in the exhibition halls of the Baltics looks quite lively. A 1000 m² exhibition has unfolded at the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), which presents Physical Culture, a solo project by internationally acclaimed Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas. On April 12, a whole bouquet of exhibitions under one conceptual "roof" will open at the Latvian National Museum of Art. These are the exhibitions of the Purvītis Prize nominees – the best Latvian art projects of the past two years, as selected by the jury. Meanwhile, in Estonia, the Artishok Biennale continues – an exciting artistic initiative that not only showcases new works by 10 artists but also includes textual interpretations of these works by 10 specially invited writers. Here, creativity and interpretation go hand in hand. And this is just the tip of the iceberg – read more below, and, of course, put together your personal list of visual priorities. The choice is yours!
ESTONIA, Tallinn
Kumu Art Museum
The Mei Sisters: Avant-Garde and the Everyday Life
Until 31 August
The sisters Kristine (1895–1969), Lydia (1896–1965) and Natalie (1900–1975) Mei, daughters of a mariner from the island of Hiiumaa, entered the Estonian art life in the second half of the 1910s. They included in their works themes and viewpoints that were unusual for female creators, rising into the ranks of the classic masters of Estonian modernism by using marginal and less appreciated techniques.
The exhibition contains drawings, watercolours, small sculptures and collages, as well as everyday items and unique handmade booklets authored under pseudonyms. The works reflect the times of the artistic sisters with immediacy and directness. Besides socio-critical attitudes, which were very unusual for female authors, we also find re-interpretations of canonical artworks. The works often have humorous undertones. A wider context to the works by the Mei sisters is created by rich photo material and a look at their circle of friends. Dora Gordine, Peet Aren, Otto Krusten, Anton Starkopf, Karin Luts, Marita Walldén and Albin Kaasinen were among the sisters’ closest artistic friends at different times.
Eglė Budvytytė. Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars. 2020. Video still. Courtesy of the artist
They Began to Talk
Until 3 August
They Began to Talk is an international group exhibition, which takes the intertwinement of the body and the environment as its point of departure, in an era marked by rapid environmental change and inequality. Sudden changes in the physical environment, often caused by human activity, can evoke mental suffering in land-based communities. Stored in the body, this trauma is passed on to future generations, who perceive it as an interruption in their relationship with their surroundings. The exhibition brings together the practices of artists working in this region with those from indigenous communities in the Nordic countries, exploring the possibility of recovering and cultivating a sense of connection.
They Began to Talk continues the Kumu Contemporary Art Gallery’s programme of exhibitions on environmental themes, which began in 2023 with Art in the Age of the Anthropocene. Artists: Pia Arke, Eglė Budvytytė, Merike Estna, Sofia Filippou & Eline Selgis, John Grzinich, Joanna Kalm, Johann Köler, Ruth Maclennan, Outi Pieski & Biret Haarla Pieski & Gáddjá Haarla Pieski, Mia Tamme, Sasha Tishkov, Vive Tolli.
Tallinn City Gallery
Uru Valter’s Solo Exhibition
Until 27 April
Uru Valter is the name that artists Erik Hõim, Ats Kruusing, and Eke Ao Nettan have given to their shared creative entity – one that primarily comes to life through process and a collective state of flow. The only proof of its existence is found in the works that emerge from this current: sculptures, videos, photographs, paintings, and performances. Their collective practice is defined by a theatrical sensibility, an appreciation for simple values, a touch of national romanticism, and a commitment to craftsmanship. There is also a distinct youthful lightness – a way of articulating ideas without fully binding them to definition.
What can one hold on to in a time when traditional roles and hierarchies have lost their meaning? When even the things that once felt certain are no longer fixed? What path should a young man take – one who, in the past, would have been born and died in the same place, dedicating his life to hard physical labour, but who now has the freedom to pursue whatever his heart desires? In preparation for their exhibition at Tallinn City Gallery, Uru Valter immersed themselves in these questions – reading August Mälk, travelling across Estonia, touching the sea, smelling the wind, and reflecting deeply. The result is an exhibition structured like a spiral, coiling in on itself like a seashell. Facade becomes interior, and the work returns to the hands of its creator. The exhibition is curated by Siim Preiman.
Kai Art Centre
'Renewable Energy I', 2025. Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm. Photo: Stanislav Stepashko
Flo Kasearu. BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone
22 March – 3 August
Flo Kasearu’s solo exhibition BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone, curated by Kari Conte, explores the dynamics of public and private space through the lens of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) phenomenon. BANANA invites visitors to engage in discussions about urban and rural development, public participation, local values, and property rights. Offering visual, auditory, and tactile experiences, BANANA combines installations, paintings, video, photography, and sculpture to create narratives about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that define contemporary development and the complexities of land use.
In BANANA, Kasearu asks: What is a community’s responsibility to the greater good when development reaches its doorstep? At community boards and meetings around the world, neighbors debate what, where, and who can build—whether it’s housing, renewable energy, transportation projects, or other forms of infrastructure. Regarding specific proposals, some individuals align with NIMBY views, while others back YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard). Typically, NIMBY perspectives regard development as negative or harmful—regardless of whether this perception is justified—while YIMBY supporters see development as beneficial for society as a whole, although this is not always the case. Over 50 newly-commissioned and recent works exploring these timely ideological and political disagreements are on display at Kai.
EKKM
Drawings: ENKKL, collage: Elo Vahtrik.
Rooms in Rhymes
4 April – 1 June
From 4 April, the exhibitions of the collaborative project Rooms in Rhymes by seven curators will start to open (followed by openings on 11, 17 and 25 April, as well as 2 and 9 May, total duration 5 April – 1 June). Each week a new exhibition by one of the curators replaces another on one of the museum floors, thus forming a rhythmical and fluctuating whole of displays throughout the museum building. The exhibition spaces designed by different curators are not necessarily expected to rhyme with each other, but it is perhaps in between the lines that something starts to resonate, creating space for potential f(r)iction. The exhibition experiments with curating as a form of poetic, performative and collective practice. In addition, the weekly openings are accompanied by a rich programme of events where the visitors are welcome to return again and again. Invited by EKKM’s in-house curator Evelyn Raudsepp, the extended group of curators is formed by EKKM’s team members usually carrying out different roles at the museum, and creatives who have previously worked with EKKM: Anita Kodanik, Brigit Arop, Johannes Luik, Laura De Jaeger, Laura Linsi and Marten Esko. The exhibition will feature more than 20 artists, both local and international, including authors from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.
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Tallinn Art Hall
Vladimir Yankilevsky and Valeri Vinogradov. Elementary Forms and the Anatomy of Feelings
Until 6 April
Vladimir Yankilevsky (born in 1938 in Moscow, and died in 2018 in Paris) was a classic of Soviet alternative art, engaging with potent polarities, and reveling in metropolises, classical music and jazz. In contrast, Valeri Vinogradov (born 1952 in Moscow, living in Tallinn since 1979) finds solace and sense of security in Estonian nature and values craftsmanship. Both are solitary figures with a Russian language and Soviet cultural background, steering clear of the hustle and bustle of the art world, and both oscillate between the burden of being a world citizen and the feeling of not truly belonging anywhere. This exhibition seeks to highlight the impact of their mwork across different cultural contexts. Curated by Tamara Luuk.
Temnikova & Kasela Gallery
Agnes Scherer, 'Kleine Psychostasie mit Wüstenhintergrund / Small psychostasis with desert background', oil, canvas, artist frame, 2021
Anna Solal, Philipp Timischl, Johanna Ulfsak, Agnes Scherer, Joshua Citarella, Robertas Narkus. Don't take it too seriously
Until 10 May
Is there any sense left in an exhibition that is so self-ironic that it does not try to say anything to the viewer? Or is it just pretending to be ironic (quite in line with zeitgeist), thereby masking its direct statement and avoiding manifesto?.. Some political ideas contradict our values, and sometimes even sound absurd. When, to our surprise, people around us start actively supporting them, and we find ourselves in the minority, irony and cynicism become an easy way to cope with this situation. We start to make caustic jokes about it – and at first, ironically, we repeat after those with whom we recently radically disagreed. Over time, only a grain of a joke remains in the joke – and this effect is also called “irony poisoning”. David Foster Wallace believed that the post-ironic cynicism that permeates contemporary culture and politics is a barrier to establishing strong interpersonal connections. To overcome post-ironic impotence, on the contrary, naivety and sincerity are needed, which, despite the risk of being ridiculed, allow trust and empathy to return to the public space. In other words, rejecting sarcasm and demagogy in favor of honest, albeit uncomfortable, conversation can help overcome irony poisoning. The only problem is that this is not only a cultural task, but also a political necessity – in conditions when there is nothing left of politics.
Mikkel Museum
Ülo Sooster (1924–1970). Forms. 1965. Indian ink. Sooster family collection
Sooster 100: View from Private Collections
Until 5 May
Ülo Sooster (1924–1970), despite his short life span, left behind a legacy of thousands of drawings and paintings, which, despite the Iron Curtain, are part of the history of surrealism in Europe. The exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Sooster’s birth brings together a selection of works in private collections by this uniquely playful creator, who was one of the most important innovators of Estonian post-war modernism. A gallery of self-portraits will function as an exhibition within the exhibition: it includes works from museums, and traces Sooster’s development from an underground artist excluded from public art life to a seminal figure in 20th century Estonian – and, more broadly, Eastern European – art history.
Dedicated to the artist’s 100th birthday, the exhibition takes a retrospective look at Sooster’s life and work: his early attempts at painting in Hiiumaa, his painterly period in Tartu under the influence of the Pallas Art School, the relief and serial works of his heyday in Moscow and the mysterious unfinished works of his last years. A total of seventeen private collectors have lent works to the exhibition.
Fotografiska
两点一刻215, 2016 ©️冯立
Feng Li. White Nights in Wonderland
Until 20 April
With the Chinese New Year, Fotografiska opens an exhibition by photographer Feng Li titled "White Nights in Wonderland", inviting visitors to experience modern society through a surreal spectacle. Internationally acclaimed street and fashion photographer Feng Li has developed a distinctive visual language — his photos stand out in a world saturated with images for their unique ability to embrace irony and highlight the humor in everyday life.
The "White Nights" series is set against the backdrop of modern cities, focusing on the gritty, messy, and shamelessly artificial playgrounds of the streets—elements often cropped out in photos taken with smartphones. His vivid, silent images capture fleeting, mysterious moments and the absurdities of everyday life, evoking complex emotions under the bright glare of a flash that distorts the sense of time and blurs the boundary between night and day. Feng Li skillfully employs technique, timing, composition, light, and color, with his signature mastery of the flash. He has a unique ability to notice and capture peculiar and surreal moments, weaving them together with explosive colors and evocative details.
Tütar gallery
Siiri Jüris. to melt into your soil and sprout as a flower
Until 4 May
Siiri Jüris (1992) is an Estonian painter currently living and working in Uppsala, Sweden. She holds a BA and MA in Painting from the University of Tartu (2015, 2017) and an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2021). Using archival materials and personal memories as a foundation, interwoven with fictional narratives, she creates immersive worlds saturated in color, where figurative and abstract, synthetic and organic, traditional and digital visual languages converge. Her paintings are created through an intuitive, slow, and layered process, in which the acrylic material is treated as an active agent, allowing unexpected forms and patterns to emerge. She uses the vibrancy and dullness, fluidity and transparency of the acrylic to create a strong visual experience, combining classical painting techniques with arts and crafts and post-internet aesthetics.
Various locations throughout Tallinn
Artjom Astrov’s work JUICE is open at Vanaturu kael 3. Photo: Joosep Kivimäe
The 9th Artishok Biennial
Until 20 April
Last held in 2022, the 2025 edition of the major contemporary art biennial, with curators Brigit Arop and Margit Säde, is titled Siesta. The openings of ten new artworks are taking place sporadically throughout February and March at various locations throughout Tallinn, often activating locations that are undergoing transitions or are stuck in an in-between state. Making good use of the unattractive time of year, as well as the low season and human hibernation, the works will be presented in places that do not usually exhibit art.
At a time when the interpretation of art – including various attempts at analysing and ‘decoding’ it – are becoming increasingly relevant in the effort to undermine accusations of contemporary art being inaccessible and elitist, the Artishok Biennial seems more relevant than ever. Here, the creation of art and its interpretation go hand in hand throughout the entire two-month duration of the biennial.
Read our interview with its curators, Brigit Arop and Margit Säde.
ESTONIA, Tartu
Kogo gallery
Mihkel Maripuu. Exobiota
Until 19 April
Mihkel Maripuu’s solo exhibition Exobiota rips post-internet art from the slick, weightless void of the screen and forces it into physical space, giving the virtual what it has never had: a body. Airbrushed gradients, hyper-clean hues, and high-res perfection – visuals built for seamless digital flow – are locked down, chained to the gallery, forcing the digital to bear the weight, rawness and intensity of the physical world. To breathe the same air as us. The mindless flow of scrolling crashes into stillness, demanding engagement beyond the screen.
Today, the human experience is inseparable from the screen. We do not merely use screens; we live through them. The digital is no longer an external interface for the human body – it’s hardwired into our contemporary daily life, shaping how we communicate, consume information, think and decode the world around us. Maripuu’s works tap into Bernard Stiegler’s idea that we don’t simply use digital tools; they enter and pharmacologically change us, like medicinal drugs, affecting both our bodies and our consciousness. Like a human being navigating between their virtual shadows and a body of flesh and bone, these paintings pulse in a state of instability – uncanny yet beautiful, disquieting yet seductive.
Tartu Art Museum
Photo: Madis Palm
Terje Ojaver. Serpent
Until 28 Spetember
Terje Ojaver, a classic of contemporary Estonian sculpture, is opening the new solo exhibition Serpent at the Tartu Art Museum on 8 March, displaying the very latest of her work and a selection of her earlier creations. Terje Ojaver’s sculptures speak of life as a challenge that must be faced. A giant woman armed with a pitchfork is ready to defend her home and children, yet she is fully aware of the dual purpose of her weapon. She knows that a corpse is essentially fertilizer, worm food: the beginning of new life.
By surrendering themselves to the cycles of nature, the figures in Terje Ojaver’s work rise above the self-indulgent absurdity of human activity. They are saints. However, Ojaver’s animalism does not draw inspiration from shamanism; it is instead modernist, classic and the work of a trained sculptor. Just as nature serves as a religious imperative for Ojaver, traditional craftsmanship forms the ethical foundation of her artistic practice. Art must be good, and its contents must align with the laws of nature.
LATVIA, Riga
Latvian National Museum of Art
Viktor Timofeev. Nonexistent System. 2024. Watercolour on paper. Courtesy of the artist. Publicity photo
Viktor Timofeev. Other Passengers
22 March – 15 June
From 22 March 2025, the Latvian National Museum of Art will host Viktor Timofeevs' solo exhibition Other Passengers in the exhibition halls on the fourth floor. This exhibition will combine the most important motifs of the artist's creative practice – inner worlds, language, bureaucracy, the crowd, and the individual. The newly created works will reflect on the world as the coexistence and collision of two parallel and opposing realities, interwoven by a diverse and branching web of relationships.
Timofeev has long focused on themes in his work that, from both his personal experiences and the perspectives of cultural and societal processes, reflect on the forms of governance and communication maintained by power and political systems, as well as individual experiences, whether striving to integrate, follow, and adhere to these systems or, conversely, rebel against them. This includes questions of identity, language, and communication that arise from human migration and life between different countries, nationalities, territories, and borders, but it can also be tied to specific places and their migration histories. Timofeev’s ideas unfold in fantastical environments, combining drawings, paintings, video and installations. The works, often autobiographical, point to the real world and the cognitive dissonance that arises when inner and outer worlds meet, as shared value systems and symbols—frequently cross-cultural—intersect and collide.
The exhibition of the Purvītis Prize 2025 finalists
12 April – 8 June
The exhibition consists of an impressive collection of paintings, graphics, sculptures, objects and installations, created by eight artists and artist collectives nominated for the ninth Purvītis Prize by independent experts. The artsts are: Indriķis Ģelzis, Romāns Korovins, Ieva Kraule-Kūna, Inga Meldere un Luīze Nežberte, Luīze Rukšāne, Krišs Salmanis, Elza Sīle, Paula Zvane.The Purvītis Prize is the largest and most prestigious award in the field of visual arts in Latvia. It was established in 2008 with the aim of regularly and systematically focusing on current events and evaluating the most outstanding achievements in professional Latvian visual arts.The curator of the exhibition is Daiga Rudzāte. The winner of the Purvītis Prize 2025 will be named on May 23, 2025.
Head of the panel of experts Arta Vārpa commented: “The following tendencies become obvious considering both the quarterly nominations and the shortlisted eight artists. First, alongside well-established authors, artists representing the younger generation are convincingly making a name for themselves on the Latvian art scene – equipped with international art education and embarking on an international career yet also clearly looking for opportunities to show in Latvia, although frequently unable to access the required resources and art infrastructure for that. Second, there is an increasing tendency for mutual collaboration. Artists (and curators, as well as people representing other areas) create joint projects, interact nonhierarchically and form dialogues with the art of previous generations. The finalists’ exhibitions stand out with their intense messages, tying their art to acute global issues. Several of the projects are permeated with a sense of global and individual threat; artists also offer strategies for overcoming hard times and apocalyptic scenarios.”
Art Museum RIGA BOURSE
Photo: Kristīne Madjare
Bernar Venet. Painting: From Rational to Virtual. 1966–2024
Until 27 April
Bernar Venet is one of the most charismatic figures on the contemporary art scene, making this exhibition an opportunity to explore not only the work of a unique artist but also his significant contributions to both twenty and twenty-first-century Conceptual art. The exhibition – which has been created especially for Riga and the Great Hall of the Art Museum Riga Bourse, – is being produced by the culture and art portal Arterritory.com in collaboration with Bernar Venet Studio and the Latvian National Museum of Art. ‘Bernar Venet constantly challenges the limits of his ideas, possibilities, life, and art as a process. For him, making art means articulating and transforming while involving various disciplines – science, mathematics, music, architecture, physics and geometry, as well as what is happening in the media space,’ says Una Meistere, one of the project’s curators.
The exhibition will include a total of 28 paintings by the artist, presenting both recent works and examples from the early stages of Venet’s career. The central axis of this exhibition is mathematics, which, in Venet’s words, encompasses ‘the greatest abstraction ever created’. He says: ‘I borrow these formulas, these “figures,” from science books. It sometimes happens that I add an equation to a figure I have selected, because it complements it, but also because it reduces the formal aspect of certain selected subjects and makes them more complex and less able to be immediately interpreted as a “beautiful image.” My subjects are chosen for their novelty, for their visual originality. And often because of their “difference,” their “distance” from everything I have learnt about art. The use of mathematics, in my practice, is meant to introduce another reality. This is a language that has its own formal peculiarities, its own organization, its own aesthetic rules. What interests me here is the richness of a proposition freed from the stylistic restraints of the kind of art that identifies with the great historical movements of the 20th century.’
Riga Contemporary Art Space
Ieva Raudsepa. Tokyo Highway Scene
Until 19 April
Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris begins a day before Kris Kelvin sets off for a space station orbiting the oceanic planet from which the movie takes its name. In an episode shot from the perspective of a driving car, we see a city of the future. The images of the vast and fast-paced transportation network in this imaginary metropolis were shot on the highways of Tokyo in 1971. Rapid technological development and large-scale infrastructure projects carried out in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s fed into the idea of Tokyo as a city of the future in the popular imagination outside of Japan. The construction of Shutoko – the Metropolitan Expressway in Tokyo – began in 1959, and the expressway system is still being expanded.
We meet the narrator of Tokyo Highway Scene when she is in a taxi, going to give a lecture at a conference. At the event she will speak about her research on fictionalised images of Tokyo representing the city of the future in movies from the late 20th century — in what ways did people imagine “the future” in the past and what can we make of it today? The main character of this story finds herself in a moment of great uncertainty: Is there anyone who is looking forward to the moment that comes after this one?
Siegfried. Nomadic Cinema
12 April – 8 June
The exhibition will offer an insight into the work of Sig (Siegfried Debrebant), a French composer, musician, film director and traveler of worlds. Although Sig's sudden death last autumn has radically altered the process of making this exhibition, and most likely the way we look at his oeuvre, which now is revealed in its totality, it is a full-fledged emanation of his ideas and presence. The exposition is centered around the film Kinogamma I & II, which is more than two hours long masterpiece of ecstatic world view. It is complemented by black-and-white analog photographs taken during Sig's wanderings, which can be viewed both as a supplement to his cinematic vision of the world, as travel notes, or as an artistic inquiry into the mysteries of the human dimension.
Sig's film and photo works are permeated by an undisguised, perhaps even romantic fascination with the mundane, almost invisible substance of the human existence. The image appears here as a witness and interpreter of mysteries of time and being, where Bresson's "decisive moment" merges with the Mythical time in which all the present, past and future coexist, where the evanescent and timeless are intertwined into one inextricable totality.
Zuzeum Art Centre
Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė
Until 18 May
The exhibition focuses on the works of three Baltic women artists – Malle Leis (1940–2017), Maija Tabaka (1939) and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė (1933–2007) – in the late Soviet era of the 1970s and 1980s. All three of the artists challenged contemporary art discourses through non-conventional approaches to self-representation, ways of creating space and reflections on being artists.
The title Unframed refers to the boundaries that all three artists crossed in their works, but also to a new interpretative horizon that their works create for each other. Moreover, all three artists produced a significant number of images in which the (female) protagonist steps out of the picture or turns her back on the viewer, creating visual metaphors of leaving or moving on to a new territory. In other works, the artists played with multiple frames that shift the perception of a stable and uniform reality. Leis, Tabaka and Rožanskaitė were all exceptional artists in Soviet-occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The education they got from art institutes in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in the 1950s and 1960s was similar in terms of its ideological and aesthetic principles, but soon they all moved beyond those principles: not necessarily by directly opposing their current art discourses, but by navigating them in ways that shifted and blurred the meanings of seemingly straightforward motifs and gestures.
ISSP gallery
Photo by Armands Andže
Armands Andže. Fear of the Landscape
Until 18 April
The exhibition explores unfinished architectural narratives in urban spaces, revealing a liminal state between presence and oblivion. Skeletons of unfinished buildings and monumental elitist high-rises become artefacts of the urban spectacle – testimonies that transcend public imagination and reflect the voices of ignored communities. Andže employs early analogue photographic techniques such as daguerreotype and dry glass plate methods to highlight the exhibition’s themes. Developed in the early 19th century, the daguerreotype is one of the earliest photographic processes, using a silver-plated sheet of copper to produce a singular image characterized by high detail and a mirror-like surface. Through these techniques, Andže emphasizes the transient nature of landscapes and the tangible presence of the photographic image, in which past and future collide. Each image displayed in the exhibition is unique, existing as a single, irreplaceable artefact.
The aesthetics of the urban environment are shaped not only by its visual appearance but also by the emotions it evokes as we observe the everyday landscapes that surround us. While aesthetic value is subjective, it nevertheless impacts each passerby. Fear of the Landscape is Andže’s exploration of this experience, rooted in both individual and collective memory. Landscapes, especially unfinished urban structures or monumentalized objects, can create tension between feelings of connection and isolation. In this context, urban landscapes serve both as visual elements and as spaces where society’s collective fears, memories and relationships with a changing environment are laid bare.
Galerija ASNI
Sabīne Vernere. Female Monsters
29 March 29 – 26 April
In “Female Monsters” the artist explores the feminine monster narrative in Western culture and psychoanalysis, seeking its origin in ancient Greek myths. She also reflects on the imprints this figure has left on her personal experience, expressing them in ink and egg tempera paintings, ceramics and marble.
“Over the last three years, during my professional doctoral studies programme, I have examined feminine monster myths in depth, particularly the figures of Medusa, Pandora and the Sirens. I am intrigued by the question – how did this “evil” which terrifies both gods and humans come about?” explains Vernere. Vernere’s concluding exhibition of her professional doctoral studies programme encompasses her works made over the last three years, in which the artist examines ancient Greek myths and art in depth, searching for her “apotropaic sign”, i.e. a figure which stands up to the ignorant, accusing gazes which demonise feminine sexuality and power. The first and oldest apotropaic sign found on armour is the head of Medusa. According to Homer, it adorned Athena’s breastplate and later King Agamemnon’s shield. Both mortals and gods deployed this symbol to put the fear of death into their foes. Vernere employs sexuality in her art as an apotropaic sign, i.e. a shield with Medusa’s head, to oppose the prevailing ignorance and treatment of sexuality as a taboo.
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LATVIA, Daugavpils
Rothko Museum
Ritums Ivanovs. “Temple. Rothko. Blue”. Acrylic on canvas. 200 x 340 cm. 2024/5. Photo by Jānis Deinats
Ritums Ivanovs. Temple
Until 18 May
After several years of creative research and collaboration with the Rothko Museum, Ritums Ivanovs transforms the former military arsenal into a Temple with four chapels. The series of paintings, divided and arranged according to the structure of the arsenal building, continue the artist’s deep interest in analysing the language of portraiture. In the creations of Ivanovs, the portrait refers to a direction rather than a destination, indicating the multi-layered and elusive nature of self-reflection. A portrait is only a means towards the goal – a mirror in which one can see what is beyond words and explanations.
Each of the chapels reveals questions of importance for the artist. Each is a space for meditation, where the relationship between the painter and the painted can be analysed through the observation of light and colour. The axis of the exhibition is the interaction between the three artists. A space for reflection on how feelings, thoughts, and perspectives on the diversity of self-reflective perceptions are changing.
LITHUANIA, Vilnius
Contemporary Art Centre (CAC)
Augustas Serapinas. Physical Culture
Until 4 May
The Great Hall of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) presents Physical Culture, a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas. This marks the largest and most ambitious presentation of his work to date. The first iteration of Physical Culture was created in 2012 while Serapinas was a third-year student at the Vilnius Academy of Arts’ Sculpture Department. Since then, various versions of the installation have been exhibited at major international contemporary art platforms, including Unlimited at Art Basel in Switzerland (2023), 1857 project space in Oslo (2017), Bâtard performance art festival in Brussels (2016), and Frieze art fair in London (2016). The CAC now presents the most expansive edition of this work, covering 1,000 square metres and featuring fully operational fitness machines where replicas of plaster sculptures replace conventional weights.
The installation is activated by both individuals practicing academic drawing – traditionally focused on copying classical sculptures – and groups of visitors who will engage with the artwork as a functioning gym. Audiences will have the opportunity to take a closer look at Western art history and rethink local education systems, which emphasise repetitive practice and diligent, hard work – paralleled here with the discipline of working out in a gym. The Lithuanian title of the work, Kūno kultūra, plays on the dual meaning of ‘physical education’ and the broader educational system, referencing the legacy of ancient Greece, where the cult of the body – still dominant in Western culture – originates.
Anastasia Sosunova. Fandom
Until 4 May
In this exhibition, Anastasia Sosunova continues her series of works inspired by the spiritual teachings of the founder of Senukai hardware stores. These teachings have been a guiding force for the business since its inception. Through fan fiction, the artist seeks to unlock the tensions, passions, and frustrations that arise between power and faith, encoded in rituals and hidden beneath the promises of DIY self-actualisation.
Fan fiction rarely adheres strictly to its source material. Instead, it often takes radical creative liberties, interpreting its inspiration through diverse genres such as comics, literary fiction, amateur cinema, or even pornography. In this case, Sosunova draws inspiration from the Lithuanian entrepreneur’s spiritual philosophies, shared through his books, radio programme, and the symbolic imagery associated with Senukai. The resulting works – comprising a sculptural installation and a video piece – combine the aesthetics of indie cinema with digital terrains, observational footage, and the ecstatic confession of a lonely follower. According to Sosunova, the exhibition serves as a farewell song to a form of capitalism her generation grew up with. By revisiting the transformations of the recent decades, she offers a lens through which to view the contemporary landscape of technofeudalism – a world shaped by new unicorns and entirely different modern-day prophets.
MO Museum
From Within
Until 31 August
An attentive and purposeful encounter with art has a positive effect on health. Works of art are multifaceted and integrate various aspects within them – which is why interacting with them has a healing power. Art speaks to us and helps develop resilience, the ability to cope with arising difficulties and act consciously. When we stand still and exist within our internal reaction to a work of art, we allow ourselves to open up to different interpretations and understand our experience in a new way, through different eyes. From Within is the first exhibition in Lithuania to combine art history and psychology on such a scale. By relying on these two disciplines, we encourage reflection on the multifaceted impact of art. The tools of art history help us understand visual language, while psychology guides us toward self-analysis. The questions that accompany this exhibition connect these two fields – like Ariadne’s thread, they help maintain a direction of looking and thinking, compelling us to open up and experience the therapeutic effect of art.
Vilnius National Art Gallery
Silver Girls. Retouched History of Baltic Photography
29 March – 15 June
The exhibition presents a selection of works by twenty-one early women photographers from the Baltic States. Some of their stories significantly contribute to art history, while others serve as small but essential expansions of an existing view of our shared past. Placed in dialogue with contemporary artists (Marge Monko, Diāna Tamane, Goda Palekaitė) from the same region, mirroring each other between different centuries, practices, and topics, their stories become a part of a larger narrative of the development of photography.
When photography arrived in the Baltics, it quickly captivated the nobility, including noblewomen, who embraced it as a hobby. With the rise of commercial photography in the early 20th century, women found employment in the emerging industry. Though many of them worked in the shadow of their male counterparts - often as retouchers, copyists, or assistants - others managed to set up their own studios, shaping images of the world that would please the customer while actively participating in photography’s pursuit to become art. Silver Girls exhibition project first took place in 2020 at the Tartu Art Museum. It showed selected works by ten early women photographers from Estonia and Latvia paired with works by contemporary European artists contemplating our visual history’s lost and neglected aspects. Now, the initial selection of the photographers has been expanded, bringing together all three Baltic countries and their stories. Curators: Šelda Puķīte, Agnė Narušytė and Indrek Grigor.
The Radvila Palace Museum of Art
Everything You Are Not Supposed to Do. 21st-century Lithuanian female artists within the historical painting
Until 28 September
The exhibition Everything You Are Not Supposed to Do invites you to explore the practices of 21st-century Lithuanian female artists against the backdrop they deserve – within the historical painting exhibit at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art. Situated alongside 16th-to-19th-century Western European artists, these 21st-century artworks also come from the repositories of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, which safeguard not just tapestries and photographs but also an idea of what our state should be, its cultural and memory priorities. To reveal and actualise this collection, we too must do things we are seemingly not supposed to, such as breaking polite silence or giving up our curatorial authority. And we are only successful some of the time – even as I am writing this text, I am not sure how everything will work out. Whatever happens to this exhibition and to the world, I hope that, at least for a short while, it will allow you to do if not all, then perhaps some of the things you are not supposed to do: marry whomever you want, read strangers’ conversations, proudly accept sickness and loneliness, insist on gifting art, and recognise yourself as a deity; create ever-so-slightly too elaborate names for joy, both shared and personal, which is one of the most natural weapons against cruelty.
Galerija Vartai
Dominykas Sidorovas. Convoi Exceptionnel
Until 5 April
The conceptual foundation of the exhibition is built on two poles. The first is the everyday and the domestic – echoed in the technical term convoi exceptionnel, which signals oversized cargo. The second is metaphorical: 'A runny nose for you, the end of the world for me.’ A reflection on the tendency to exaggerate events, transforming the trivial into something overwhelming, intrusive, or even terrifying.
This exhibition explores the weight of life – the bulkiness of experiences and actions, the heaviness and lightness of emotions. Emphasizing contrast, it presents Dominykas Sidorovas' latest large- and small-format paintings, where everyday objects, their shadows, and their distortions become central motifs. His works encode human trajectories, as well as the events and phenomena that shape us. The palette of the artist’s newest paintings is intense, sharp, almost glaring – reminiscent of a warning sign on the road. His fresh brushstrokes and the clarity of the painted surfaces resemble fleeting notes of thought, captured in the rush of time. A brief impression – the play of passing shadows, a flicker of sunlight – that nonetheless lingers long after.
Editorial Project Space
Marta Frėjutė and Sallamari Rantala. It Used to Be a Castle
Until 5 April
The exhibition explores the human relationship with materials, history, geology, and time, using a range of artistic approaches. Working with sand, glass, and elements of humour, the artists examine how humans exploit both living and inorganic matter for their anthropocentric fantasies – shaping their environment to fulfill emotional needs. The title immediately places the viewer in multiple contexts that both complement and contradict each other. On the one hand, it combines a serious, if not even a bitter, context with a lighter but no less important one – evoking history (in the broader sense), archaeology, the discovery of castles’ ruins, the imaginative narratives that follow, and the heavy context that comes with them (the creation of various metanarratives, etc.). At the same time, this ‘heavy’ context – likely overused and tiresome – is set aside to make way for castles of a different kind, built on the shore not for eternity but with the full knowledge that they will vanish within hours.
Archaeology and geology in this exhibition retain a certain romance, one that emerges as we dig deeper into the earth, encountering remnants we can barely recognize. Here, crumbs take on multiple meanings – like a handprint, a delicate two-dimensional trace of a body that also has – or once had – legs, a head, a belly button (Frėjutė’s We Were Here). The stained glass with palm prints brings several elements – often restricted to highly guarded territories – closer to the viewer and everyday life. These include Stone Age cave art, typically reserved only to a select few, and stained glass, which for centuries has served as an inaccessible cavity of coloured light in sacred spaces. In the exhibition, this heritage calms down, descending from its slightly frustrated grandeur to meet the viewer.
Pamėnkalnio Gallery
Vidmantas Jusionis. Sailing Away
Until 8 April
The works in the exhibition have been created over the last three years, although one of them, Sailing Away, dates back to 1997. The painting, which has been hanging above the artist’s bed for many years, is presented here as an introduction, a point of departure in Jusionis’s work and its evolution. Repetition and change are both important for the artist. Motifs, construction, characters, formats of paintings are repeated, but the colour relationships change. The dominance of blue is replaced by red, and red by magenta, violet and yellow. The same characters, animal-human figures move in a circle, until all life disappears in the obscurity of the paintings.
The works on show are inspired by different cultural, memory and experience layers – from Homer’s Odyssey, the Arabic tale of Sinbad the Sailor, to Ernest Hemingway’s posing with his catch of predatory fish, or Jan Vermeer’s reflective Dutch interiors. In the exhibition, each painting stands on its own and together they offer a common field of perception. “I hope that the works on display will give the viewer the freedom of feeling, of perception, and encourage their own interpretations. I want the totality of the exhibited paintings to create a suggestive, emotionally influential space, in which the figures of various characters, or their absence, coexist in an imaginary space,” says Vidmantas Jusionis.
Lithuanian Art Centre TARTLE`
Solely Saints
Until 1 May
The exhibition Solely Saints welcomes you to explore depictions of saints spanning from the 16th century to contemporary times. Among them, you’ll encounter creations by artists who refined their craft over many years of practice, alongside works crafted by self-taught village god-makers who fashioned these figures in accordance with their faith and individual methods and means. Within the exhibition, folk art and professional works converge around thematic elements, offering a unique juxtaposition that illustrates how self-taught folk artists and trained professionals alike interpret the same Christian iconographic themes.
Comprising over 150 pieces, the exhibition draws from the extensive TARTLE collection as well as contributions from other private collections. The exhibition aims not only to unveil these treasures from private collections but also to underscore the enduring affinity of artists for Christian imagery and the collectors’ inclination to cherish them as objects of devotion.
