Emilija Škarnulyté
Ars Fennica 2023
The multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Emilija Škarnulytė has long been attuned to the stories that have shaped the transition from modern humanism to the post-human condition of perpetual crisis, critical hope, and a return to allegory as a means of comprehending the self and the Other within the maelstrom of radical change known as the twenty-first century.
Artwork
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Introduction
Emilija Škarnulyté
The multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, Emilija Škarnulytė has long been attuned to the stories that have shaped the transition from modern humanism to the post-human condition of perpetual crisis, critical hope, and a return to allegory as a means of comprehending the self and the Other within the maelstrom of radical change known as the twenty-first century.
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1987, Škarnulytė is a consummate explorer—a role necessary for an artist whose primary concerns are global concerns. Educated in Italy and Norway, and working in Berlin and Tromsø, she draws inspiration from ecologically unique locales as far flung and storied as the Arctic Circle, the deserts of the American West, the deserts of the Middle East, nuclear power stations of Europe, Cold War bases, ancient civilizations lost to the seas, and aphotic zones. And, in a vertiginous sense, she links the historical significance of these locales to the quantum and microscopic phenomena that constitute the infinitesimal building blocks of the world with a cinematic vision that scales the more-than-microscopic and to the astronomical.
These geographical locales and dimensional layers serve as the contexts for her speculative “archaeological” films that reflect on the current world from an imagined future perspective in which the conscious being critically investigates the long-term ecological ramifications of the anthropocentric present. As such, they appear as points of reference in her meditative works, which often position modern myths—like the mystique of the nuclear age—within the grander context of geological deep time in order to ask how did we get here?
Expert's Statement
// Anne Barlow
It has been an enormous honour to participate as selector for the Ars Fennica 2023 Award. The process involved carrying out studio visits with each artist and considering the breadth and scope of their work in recent years alongside their presentations at Kiasma. This provided an invaluable opportunity to engage with the artists’ interests and ideas, and to consider the continuing evolution of their practice. I found all five artists to be exceptional in terms of the strength of their vision and quality of work, which made selecting one artist for the Award a challenging task.
The decision to give the Award to Emilija Škarnulytė is based on the unique approach that she has demonstrated in her films and immersive installations. Her work is deeply complex in terms of both content and methodology, covering topics such as climate change, extraction, and extinction in ways that combine critical analysis with a searching imagination.
Škarnulytė views her subject matter from the perspective of an archaeologist from the future, casting a lens on specific places, sites and technologies that interest her: aphotic zones of the sea, Cold War military bases, mining sites, neutrino observatories, deep-sea data storage units, and a decommissioned nuclear power plant. In terms of their legacies as structures or invasive processes, she views these as ‘monuments’ or in some cases ‘scars’ in the earth’s environment, raising questions around what they might communicate to future beings about humankind, its values and endeavours.
Her cinematic vision combines documentary footage with digitally rendered imagery, moving from macro to micro in terms of a slow panning gaze from vast architectural interiors to suggestions of the infinitesimal. Her interest in an expanded understanding of the senses can be seen in her Kiasma presentation, Aldona (2013), a film of her grandmother who became blind in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. In this film, Škarnulytė focuses on the senses of hearing and touch, whilst also bringing to the work renewed political resonance, connecting older events with current political times in terms of the fragility of borders and human life itself.
Škarnulytė often collaborates with scientists and experts in other fields, and her research process is rigorous and persistent, sometimes taking years to gain access to restricted sites. At times, she physically places herself within these environments, for example charting a course through former nuclear submarine canals in the Arctic Circle. For these journeys she assumes the hybrid form of the mermaid, half-human and half-fish that is at once a ‘post-human’ as well as a mythical and ancient form that travels seamlessly across the past, present and future – and as such, it is a significant protagonist within her larger exploration of deep time.
Across her work, Škarnulytė considers bodies of water from a myriad of perspectives in terms of their significance in legends, myths and science fiction, sites of ancient civilisations now submerged, and spaces that are increasingly polluted and ravaged by extractive industries – acting as signifiers of the damage being done to the planet. In her powerful and mesmerising work, Škarnulytė considers critical issues of our time in a deeply compelling way and it feels fitting that she should be awarded the Ars Fennica 2023 Award.
Anne Barlow
Curator, Museum director
Anne Barlow is Director of Tate St Ives where she most recently curated exhibitions with Thao Nguyen Phan, Petrit Halilaj, and Haegue Yang. Barlow was formerly Director of Art in General, New York, Curator of Education and Media Programs, New Museum, New York, and Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, Glasgow Museums, Scotland.