Waves are lapping in all places you look. Exterior, the Atlantic Ocean stretches in entrance of Tate St Ives over an overcast sandy seaside. Inside, multi-channel movies of life-giving oceans and rivers are organized within the gallery’s temple-like area. Emilija Škarnulytė’s works occupy two primary gallery rooms in a serious eponymous exhibition contending with private reminiscence and collective historical past, each understood in expansive phrases.
The Lithuania-born artist’s formidable work is dedicated to deep time, speculative archaeology and mythologies. The present begins with Riparia 2023, a photograph representing a personality emulating the picture of a feminine masked divinity, half human, half reptilian. This units the tone for “Emilija Škarnulytė,” which focuses on the advanced exploration of time and narratives and the way strata—geological, mythological and political—intertwine in that meaning-making course of.
Aldona (2013) is a brief movie documenting ritual, the passage of time and political legacies in sensory phrases. Aldona, the artist’s grandmother, misplaced her eyesight through the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear fallout. She lives on the border with Belarus in her conventional dwelling and backyard (just lately plucked medicinal herbs grasp from the room’s ceiling). Within the movie, remembering and forgetting coalesce into two sides of the identical affliction—a well-recognized dance of the thoughts for the Homo post-Sovieticus. With out sight, Aldona depends on different senses, together with listening to and contact. In a few of the movie’s most transferring scenes, the radio performs historic tales in her kitchen; in others, Aldona’s fingers discover the face of a big Lenin statue in a sculpture park.
Within the second gallery room, lit by blacklight, we come throughout a set of sculptures and video channel installations. Right here, we transition from private to collective myths, from materials historical past to religious presences and transcendence. Škarnulytė thinks about area and the way we transfer within the exhibition, and we regularly hover beneath the floor of what’s seen, as if we have been marine explorers following a dive line.
Set up components could be skilled on their very own or in relation to 1 one other. If Water May Weep (Mermaid Tears) (2023-2024), shows lachrymiform-shaped glass phosphorescing in blue and purple hues, which evoke the Lithuanian fantasy of a weeping sea goddess. In Nucleotides (2025), numerous cell organisms are printed on a wall, offering a visible and bodily bedrock, midway between summary and natural visualizations. The set up “Wheel of the Goddess” options numerous movies from 2021 to 2023, enjoying in a steady loop on a four-screen central rotunda perforated by 4 openings, that are conceived as mirroring the structure of Tate St Ives and the cardinal instructions. The 4 interspaces present a gap and a recent option to see the works interact with one another. Movies gathered on this rotunda embody Sunken Cities (2021), peeking above the marine Roman archaeological website of Baiae; Aphotic Zone (2022), filmed 4 kilometers deep into the Gulf of Mexico to search out species surviving international warming and ocean acidification; Riparia (2023), the place the artist follows the Rhone River from Swiss glaciers to the French Camargue area that includes serpent-like creatures; in addition to Hypoxia (2023), set within the Baltic Sea’s low-oxygen “lifeless zone.”
Via one aperture, we transfer from “Wheel of the Goddess” to a different video loop channel, “A Liquid Abyss,” projecting movies together with Æqualia (2023), Rakhne (2023) and t ½ (2019) on the gallery’s finish wall. Different works within the present honor Lithuanian artists influential in Škarnulytė’s follow—notably Marija Gimbutas’s pioneering analysis on archeomythology—and observe Neolithic traces current in England’s Cornwall, explored throughout an artist residency within the area.
Whereas the sheer variety of particular person works could seem overwhelming at first, on the size of a survey, they kind a robust, cohesive proposition to assist us make sense of relics and reminiscence. Dolmens, megaliths, shapeshifting sea divinities, historic websites, trendy poisonous waste, celestial objects and extra join and reconcile regardless of their obvious stress and opposition. That is our world, the artist appears to inform us, a world that predates—and can outlive—people, but stays irascibly formed by them. Understanding this human embeddedness turns into a driving drive.
“Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by hidden worlds. My experiences of rising up in Lithuania through the last years of the Chilly Battle, surrounded by a way of decay as an empire fell aside, deepened my curiosity in what lies beneath the floor,” the artist stated in a current interview.
There’s a purpose why people have all the time feared the deep seas: it’s a terrifying realm of many unknowns that Škarnulytė slowly peels off, one which conjures unimaginable magnificence, mysteries and the sacrilegious stain of air pollution. Many of those movies sit on the fringe of ecological sci-fi. We visualize the Anthropocene in all its obscenities: the local weather disaster, human neglect towards nuclear and different waste, and irreversibly altering ecosystems. Amid this contemplative nervousness, the presence of sirens stands as an emblem of permanence in impermanence, incarnating the drive of matrilineage and people beliefs working in different spheres and legal guidelines. We hear echoes of the Nice Mom and Previous European goddess myths, together with the triple feminine archetypes of maiden, mom and crone.
Škarnulytė, who graduated with a level in sculpture, spoke through the present’s preview of “transferring photographs as sculptures.” One in every of her intentions is to seize texture and dimension in her movies. The outcome will not be a lot a conventional sculpture as a complete meditation that entails structure, visible immersion and hypnotic sound. This combination of aesthetic works superbly constructs a state of mysticism by which we’re invited to roam freely. Realizing this ambition, the artist levels a dialogue between human and nonhuman, materials and metaphysical languages that usually leaves us questioning about our personal ignorance and unmet curiosity as a species briefly hosted in a universe we all know so little about.
Via unusual, asymmetrical temporalities, we’re left to ponder what resists erosion and forgetfulness. Is decay a step towards an finish—loss of life, nothingness—or an evolution to a brand new state? Who would be the future ancestors to inform our tales, each actual and fictional? Dedicated to the artwork and act of witnessing, Škarnulytė sketches the define of an eco-feminine spirituality, a hopeful journey into the recesses of weathering and embodying infused with awe. Her private cosmology is a phenomenology of time—a temporal consciousness and consciousness. Time turns into object and topic, a lens via which every thing else could be appraised. For the artist, it’s nonlinear, cyclical and bending. She shows these qualities in an intentional scenography that elevates this alchemical present right into a respiration, pulsating type of give up.
Extra exhibition opinions
