Where is Nemunas? Exhibition series in display of Lithuanian art of the first half of the 20th century.
In the second half of the 20th century, the Nemunas began to slip away from us. A hydroelectric power plant interrupted its course and broke the river’s continuity. Pollution depleted its ecological abundance and dulled the simple desire to swim in its waters on a hot summer’s day. Today, we are trying to return to the Nemunas, asking ourselves: where has it gone? This exhibition looks for an answer in interwar Lithuania. Instead of offering a myth of paradise lost, it invites us to see the river’s many meanings. The Nemunas is life: a beaver moving through the water, flowers blooming along the banks, a gull nesting on an island, holidaymakers’ bodies drying on the sand. The Nemunas is current: carrying timber rafts, steamships and profit. The Nemunas is pulse: the unsettling force of spring ice drift, the unpredictable rhythm of rising and receding waters. The Nemunas is a landscape that binds together and pulls apart the histories of Lithuania, Poland, Germany and Belarus. The Nemunas is living matter: consoling, raging, saving, killing. To ask where the Nemunas has gone is also to ask where it can still be found: not on a map, but in our imagination, in the landscapes we inhabit, in everyday life and in our sense of identity.
This part of the permanent collection exhibition is designed as a temporary exhibition, inviting visitors to discover new stories, themes and artists. It will be opened for public until 8 November 2026.
Curators: Rugilė Rožėnė, Tomas Vaiseta.
Architect: Mindaugas Reklaitis.
Designer: Ugnė Balčiūnaitė.
Exhibits were loaned by: M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Lithuanian Central State Archives, Šiauliai Aušros Museum, Lithuanian Aviation Museum, Lithuanian Sports Museum, Birštonas Museum, Kaunas District Museum, Dr Jaunius Gumbis Lithuanian Art Collection, Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History, Kaunas Tadas Ivanauskas Museum of Zoology, Museum of the History of Lithuania Minor, Kupiškis Museum, Vytis Ramanauskas.
The image: The opening ceremony of the Kaunas City Swimming Championships on Nemunas Island. 1935. Fragment of photograph. Lithuanian Sports Museum.
From afar, one can spot a room whose paned window is overtaken by entanglements of fibre. It appears as a strange substance forming an unravelled veil, a fluid system of threads that coalesces into abstract lace. Upon entering the space, one discovers multiple formations, resembling the one in the window, descending from different parts of the ceiling and holding within their bodies ornament-like shapes, or perhaps an alien language yet to be deciphered. In the middle of the room, a tree formed from fragments of carpet has arisen and beneath it lies a female figure with a bowl, her interior revealed, while her crystallised heart hangs near the entrance. Around this mystical scene, processes of metamorphosis unfold as plant forms emerge from the walls, transforming into visceral, human-like body parts before returning once again to vegetal states. This is the world unfolding at Kogo Gallery, where three artists, Anna Malicka, Noushin Redjaian and Kadri Liis Rääk, come together to create a room of their own: a women’s space woven from layered memories, sedimented meanings and material traces.
Thrifters and Transformers brings together artists who, in a sensual and intimate manner, reshape the world’s matter through resources drawn from nature, cultural history and tradition, collective memory and embodied knowledge, as well as found objects and materials awaiting a second life. Their shared artistic trajectory foregrounds both the physical and symbolic potential of materiality, while queering ideas associated with design and fashion. At the core of their practices lies an interest in liminal states, where unconscious impulses and sensory experience become entangled with accumulated knowledge and lived experience.
Anna Malicka, who sometimes endearingly refers to herself as a moth, introduces the liquid lace inhabiting the exhibition space. Described as fibre graffiti and free-standing lace, these works unfold as embodied abstract drawings and unconscious scribbles akin to asemic writing. Made from gathered leftover threads, they weave together thrifted imagery of children’s drawings, calligraphic handwriting, murmurs of cracks in urban environments and ornamental motifs borrowed from metal railings, blurred with fragments of a personal diary. Evoking both vernacular domestic lace and the traces left on city walls, Anna Malicka’s practice navigates noisy self-reflection by allowing the unconscious mind, her alter ego – the “chaotic I” – and the sewing machine to operate as a form of witchcraft. Her works suggest a nervous pulsation or the residue of a storm, while also opening spaces of stillness where creation becomes both an escape and an act of care.
In an unconscious stream of thought, a landscape emerges by Noushin Redjaian, built from patchworks of carpets from Iran, Afghanistan, the Indo-Modern sphere, the Nepal Himalayas and Turkey, interwoven with memory and protected by crystals. In the gallery, she has planted a Tree of Life that draws together mythologies from Western culture, Kabbalah and broader symbolic traditions. The tree itself remains silent; instead, the woman beneath it, representing Mneme (unarticulated memory), conveys its stories through an act of care, offering water to sustain it. Redjaian explores the entanglement of soma, mneme and memoria, tracing relations between body, consciousness and the preservation of experience. Hands recur in her works as a motif of both care and craftsmanship, echoing the layered cultural history of carpets. Minerals are introduced as protective matter, treated like primordial inscriptions that crystallise memory into form.
The third layer is cultivated by Kadri Liis Rääk, who explores human–nature entanglements in states of flux. By sourcing and transforming both natural and synthetic materials and merging ancient craft techniques with contemporary practices, she creates works that resist fixed identities. Her sculptures shift between fleshy, human-like forms, vegetal structures and other morphologies, generating both visual and tactile intensity. Biomorphic, sensual and at times unsettling, they evoke encounters with nature experienced at close range, while their anthropomorphic qualities destabilise perception, blurring the boundaries of what is seen and felt. These works open liminal spaces where bodily experience, personal reflection and encounters with both foreign and Estonian landscapes are translated into sculptures and drawings that remain in a constant state of becoming, hovering between the familiar and the strange, and inviting engagement through imagination, sensation and touch.
Throughout the exhibition, the artists’ practices merge into a patchwork landscape of mythological scenes and symbolic gestures, everyday noise, the search for womanhood, and entanglements between nature and the human. Embroidery, craft, fairy-tale imaginaries, vulnerable bodies and forms of nature – historically framed as “feminine” and therefore diminished – coalesce into an empowered field. By gathering inherited knowledge, overlooked traditions and diverse materialities, the artists generate a visceral and transformative presence. The space they create resists conventional hierarchies of time, function and order, opening instead an entangled and expansive mode of being, grounded not in erasure, but in transformation.
BIOS
Anna Malicka (b. 1995, Riga, Latvia) is a Riga-based artist whose practice centres on handicraft, creating tactile, imaginary spaces that explore the untamed and unconscious – her chaotic “I” – through scribbled texts, embroideries and upholstered surfaces. Malicka holds a BA from the audiovisual department Motion. Image. Sound (2020) and an MA from the interdisciplinary department POST (2023) at the Art Academy of Latvia. Her recent projects include the solo exhibitions Paper reCollection at Gallery 427 in Riga and Dowry Chest (((pure lady))) at kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga (2025). Malicka was nominated for the Annual Art Award of Latvia in 2025 and received the Linstow Art Award (2024) and the Helen Scott Lidgett Studio Award (2023/2024). She is part of the artist collectives PR0_Bi$TR0 and Latvānija.
Noushin Redjaian (b. 1988, Graz, Austria) is a Vienna-based artist whose multifaceted practice combines materials and contexts drawn from her cultural surroundings and the natural world. Redjaian studied Graphic Art and Printmaking (2015–2016), Transmedia Art (2012–2015) and Fashion (2010–2017) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has also trained in carpet and textile restoration. Her recent projects include the solo exhibitions Tree of Life at Galerie Ernst Hilger (2026), where love goes at Galerie Kandl and Cherish at Ve.Sch Kunstverein in Vienna (2025) and a group exhibition Weaving the Present at Neue Kunstverein Wien (2026). Redjaian received the Young Artist Award at Bildrecht & Parallel Vienna (2023–2024) and the VCC × viennacontemporary Collectors Prize (2024). Noushin Redjaian is represented by Galerie Ernst Hilger.
Kadri Liis Rääk (b. 1990, Tallinn, Estonia) is a Tallinn-based artist and junior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts whose work explores touch and tactility as modes of experiencing bodily space and embodied perception. Rääk holds a BA in Film Scenography (2014) and an MA in Contemporary Art (2019) from the Estonian Academy of Arts, as well as an MA in Autonomous Design (2018) from KASK in Ghent. Her work has been presented internationally, including at Sequences Biennale XI in Reykjavík and in a solo exhibition at NOW: Gallery in Lima. Since 2022, she has been a doctoral candidate in the Art and Design programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Šelda Puķīte (b. 1986, Riga, Latvia) is a Latvian curator, writer, and researcher based in Estonia. She holds BA and MA degrees in Art History and Theory from the Art Academy of Latvia. She has worked on international exhibitions, curated art fair stands, published art albums, created catalogues for Survival Kit and Riga Photography Biennial, and written essays for Baltic culture publications. Recent curated exhibitions include Maria Kapajeva’s By Losing Them, I Become a Whole (2025) at Kogo Gallery, Tartu; Silver Girls. Retouched History of Baltic Photography (2025), co-curated with Agnė Narušytė and Indrek Grigor at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; and White Dwarfs and All Those Beautiful Nebulas (2024) at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga. Since 2020, she works at Kogo Gallery as an international project manager and exhibition programme curator.
How do we write about art? How do we analyse cultural phenomena, interpret works of art, and develop thoughtful and engaging cultural discourse?
ARé Cultural Foundation and the Institute for Contemporary Art invite you to participate in “Covering Culture: International Perspectives”, a series of lectures and workshops designed to strengthen skills in writing about, analysing, and critically engaging with culture and the arts.
As part of the programme, four distinguished international experts will visit Armenia: Grigor Pltian (France), Alain Navara-Navassardian (Switzerland), Tigran Yegavian (France), and Alexander Arkhangelsky (Russia), who will share their professional experience, insights, and perspectives.
The programme includes:
• Public lectures open to all interested participants
• Intensive two-day workshops for pre-registered participants.
Participation is free of charge.
The working language is Armenian (except for Alexander Arkhangelsky’s lecture and workshop, which will be conducted in Russian).
The programme is supported by the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
If you are interested in art, culture, journalism, criticism, or cultural writing, this programme offers a unique opportunity to engage with leading intellectuals and deepen your understanding of contemporary cultural discourse.
Stay tuned for further details.
OPENING: 12/06/2026, 19.00
The concept centers on focusing on a single pictorial motif, involving an in-depth examination of the symbols within the image. Related motifs—such as “Saint George” or “Europa on the Bull”—also aid in better understanding, for instance, the act of riding as a metaphor for intuitive navigation. Ultimately, it is an attempt to regenerate the qualities of the hypostatic icon in our era of the “oceanic” moving image.
Manfred Stumpf (b. 1957) studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt under Thomas Bayrle starting in 1976, at the Cooper Union in New York City under Hans Haacke in 1978, and at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Bazon Brock in 1979. The traveling exhibition “Contempler-Weltreise” was presented at the following venues: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Yokohama Museum of Art, WDNH Art Center Moscow, and Portikus Frankfurt. Selected other exhibitions include: Galerie AK Frankfurt, Whitney Museum NYC, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Neue Pinakothek Munich, MMK Frankfurt, Witte de With Rotterdam, Creative Media Center Hong Kong, and Art Cabinet Nairobi.
OFFLINE_CUT explores the question of finding a new path for painting and addresses the need to return to the physical essence of the painting. At a time when the visual world is increasingly dissolving into the digital realm, into generated sketches and the pandering smoothness of computer screens, Filip Černý takes an opposing stance: a return to physical substance, to cuts, to the tension created by the resistance of the unyielding material, to craftsmanship and direct physical contact.
Who controls our data, personal sovereignty, and political freedom? Answers are offered by DATAS: The Data and the Sovereign, an exhibition in which Czech and international artists explore in their works how computing technologies, automation, and digital infrastructures undermine personal and state sovereignty.
The beasts that threaten us today are unlikely to be roaring lions; rather, they are algorithmic systems, data infrastructures, and AI-driven forms of governance that operate beyond effective democratic oversight.
This group exhibition confronts one of the defining struggles of the coming decades that is profoundly shaping human agency: the battle for sovereignty in an age when data and computation increasingly exceed legal and political control. As algorithmic systems influence public discourse, automate and manipulate decision-making, and shape the conduct of war, the foundations of democracy are being rewritten in code. Bringing together voices in art, philosophy, and technology the exhibition examines how personal and national self-determination might persist amid the forces of surveillance capitalism and authoritarianism.
The featured works range from interactive installations to narrative films and software art. They move beyond critique to model ethical alternatives to extractive digital regimes. The exhibition unfolds across three constellations. Spectres of the Leviathan addresses the datafied sovereign, examining algocracy, cybersecurity, and automated governance. Islands of Insubordination focuses on infrastructures such as energy networks, submarine cables, and data centres, revealing sovereignty as a form of logistical and computational power with ecological consequences. Songs of Refusal explores the fragility of personal sovereignty under conditions of profiling, prediction, and surveillance, where images become operative within systems of control.
– Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, curator.
You can read the full curatorial essay by Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás here.
ARTISTS:
aaajiao, Tekla Aslanishvili, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán, Mark Cinkevich, Critical Tech Group (Nazar Golianych and Nastia Kolodka), Nina Davies, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Anna Engelhardt, eeefff, fantastic little splash (Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants), Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Flaka Haliti, Tamara Kametani, Áron Lődi, Artur Magrot, Martyna Marciniak, Leon Sahiti, Rudolf Samohejl, Sfera (Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter and Ula Sowa Przybylska), Jonas Staal, Jelena Visković.
ETC. gallery invites you to a guided tour / artist talk with artist Anna Černíková in her exhibition Covered in Grease, Still Running.
The first solo exhibition by Anna Černíková, Covered in Grease, Still Running, develops the idea of the body as a machine that can be repaired, adjusted, and rewritten. The new audiovisual works draw on motifs of various forms of labor and maintenance, which become a metaphor for attempts to repair not only things, but also the present and identity. Figures maintaining mechanical and digital systems reveal the cyclical and never-ending nature of these processes, while within repetitive activity a space for dreaming begins to emerge. The loop becomes a fundamental structure of experience, in which the boundary between body, tool, and image dissolves, raising the question of whether reality and identity can truly be repaired, or merely kept in operation. Maintenance thus appears not only as a necessity, but also as a symptom of a system that produces its own failures.
Exhibition: 14. 5. – 27. 6. 2026
Curated by: Nela Klajbanová.
Exhibition in Wyspiański Pavilion.
Curator: Delfina Jałowik
The Language of Pearls is an exhibition of works by Celine Levitan, in which sewing becomes a form of pictorial thinking. The artist consistently defines her works as paintings, even though they are produced from fabrics, embroidery, and patchwork appliqués, lavishly decorated with sequins, faux pearls, and plastic stones. The material serves no utilitarian purpose here. It becomes the fabric of the image: it allows for the construction of successive layers of representation, saturated with colour, light, and meaning, which, as the artist herself emphasises, she would be unable to achieve in the traditional medium of painting.
The works on display are created intuitively, without sketches or prior plans. Compositions emerge gradually, guided by the rhythm of sewing, gesture, and associations emerging during the creative process. Titles often emerge only at the end, when the images begin to reveal their own narrative. Snakes, roosters, tongues, pearls, eyes, and female figures create not so much a closed system of symbols as an emotional and intuitive visual language. All works are powerfully autobiographical – the artist treats them as records of her own experiences, emotions, fears, desires, and inner transformations.
The exhibition title references the Jungian interpretation of the pearl as a symbol of transformation: that which arises from the experience of pain, tension, and confrontation with one’s inner self. The Language of Pearls becomes a metaphor for communicating that which defies rational description and is revealed through images, dreams, and symbols. In Levitan’s work, the tension between the intuitive and instinctive, and the ornamental, shiny, and seemingly decorative, becomes particularly significant. Faux pearls, sequins, and synthetic materials do not imitate luxury – on the contrary, they emphasise the fragility and illusory nature of societal notions of beauty, femininity, and identity.
Another important element of the exhibition is the double-sided monidło titled Woman’s Puzzle / Dress-Up Doll, inspired by paper dolls and the tradition of retouched photographic portraits. The work was conceived as an object encouraging viewers to step into the shoes of the subject and confront their own experiences with the artist’s perspective. The motif of assembling, dressing, and fashioning a female image becomes a story about identity constructed amidst social expectations, corporeality, and individual experience.
Celine Levitan (born Celina Kędziera, 1974) is a painter, graphic designer, and textile artist. A graduate of the Faculty of Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, she studied under Professor Adam Brincken. In recent years, she has been developing her own form of stitched paintings, combining her painting experience with that gained from years of working with fabric and embroidery to create decorative and functional objects.
Address: Wyspiański Pavilion plac Wszystkich Świętych 2, Kraków.
Art Transparent invites you to the 24th SURVIVAL Art Review, held under the theme “A Finger in the Heart,” which will take place from June 26 to June 30 at the former Clinic of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases complex (ul. Bujwida 44, Wrocław).
This time we will reflect on the theme “Finger in the Heart.” The curatorial team—Michał Bieniek, Daniel Brożek, Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, and Ewa Pluta—write in their curatorial statement: The eponymous Finger in the Heart emerges at the intersection of science, violence, ignorance, and emotion. It directly refers to a plaster cast of the finger of the legendary Wrocław cardiac surgeon Wiktor Bross, whose research and pioneering operations were conducted at the Clinics.
In the historical description of the space, Ewa Pluta writes: From its inception, several renowned psychiatrists and neurologists worked at the clinic, foremost among them Alois Alzheimer, the celebrated researcher of memory degeneration. In 1912, he assumed the chair of the university’s Department of Psychiatry and the position of clinic director. Although his groundbreaking research on the “disease of forgetfulness” had already been published by the time he arrived in Wrocław, it initially had little impact on the scientific community.
The SURVIVAL Art Review is a festival of contemporary art organised by the Art Transparent Foundation in Wrocław since 2003. It takes place outside exhibition institutions, often in abandoned and inaccessible places, sometimes in public buildings or open spaces. The history of the venue determines the nature of the intervention by inspiring the themes taken up by the artists and the way in which the works are presented. Each year SURVIVAL co-funds and produces dozens of brand new artistic works. An important part of the Review is its rich Public Forum programme.
Our aim is to bring issues raised by young contemporary art into the public debate. During SURVIVAL, art created outside of institutions clashes with a reality annexed by advertising, the economy and current politics. For this reason, the invited artists address fundamental issues that focus reflection on the post-1989 transformation not only in Wrocław, but in many Polish cities, such as neoliberal management, the treatment of architectural and urban heritage, or concepts of public space.
OPENING: 16/06/2026, 18.00
Curators: Alexandra Kusá, Ondřej Horák
Last year saw the development of the “Museum of Values” project, an initiative which sought to identify a visual code which expresses what it means “to be Slovak”; in essence, to locate a common ground on which we could all agree, to pinpoint “Slovak-ness” in terms of a language of visual communication which would be accessible to everyone who was born or raised here. In the modern era we are constantly bombarded by superficial nationalistic sentiments, and we thus found it interesting to explore how this played out in the history of our artworks and if we could tell the story of Slovakia without pathos, in both a historical and philosophical sense. The history of Slovak paintings should not take the form of museum exhibits but should be a vibrant dialogue in which we pose a number of questions: what values did we truly possess and which did we merely pretend to hold? Do we all hold the same values? Therefore, rather than conventional narratives about “grand histories” and documents, we focus on specific collections, commenting on cliches and examining exhibits which foster a healthy sense of pride and patriotism. The exhibition in Banská Bystrica confirmed the effectiveness of this approach, and so we decided to move forward and add “new values” in the project for the East Slovak Gallery. This exhibition will differ somewhat from the original because it draws on the collection of the Gallery and their own experience of what it means to be Slovak. We can now see that Košice has enriched our narrative through its city status, its urban culture and its associated ethnic diversity; we have also learned that the city’s inhabitants see the Tatras less as a symbol of nationhood and more as a specific site for contemplation and observation. In Košice, we can also strengthen our links to contemporary art, as the sophisticated acquisition policy of the East Slovak Gallery has borne considerable fruit in this field over recent years. Once again, we are preparing a combination of paintings, photography and contemporary multimedia installations, all of which is wrapped up in an appealing typographic arrangement. The Gallery’s collection expands the image of Slovakia and sheds light on the layered and multifaceted narratives of its history.
The project will once again include the interactive exhibition titled “The History of Slovakia”, which brings the history of the Slovak nation to a new audience through Professor Hammy, a loveable character who has gnawed his way through “all of the wisdom of the world”. This intelligent but somewhat bad-tempered rodent often poses uncomfortable questions, but he also offers quizzes and jokes, always reminding us that history should be taken with a grain of salt. The East Slovak Gallery will transform the exhibition space on Alžbetina Street into a place where visitors will not only peer into cabinets but will contemplate and leave their own legacy.
The Museum of Values works with artworks by authors such as Mikuláš Alexandrovič Bazovský, Martin Benka, Ľudovít Fulla, and Martin Martinček, as well as with works by artists important to Košice with an international reach, such as Konštatín Bauer, Anton Jasusch, Ján Vasilko, Július Jakoby, and Ján Mathé. This collection once again includes works by Matej Fabian and Ivana Šáteková, who also created a monumental site-specific installation especially for the exhibition.
