1PM–5PM
Participants: Post Brothers, Elizaveta Shneyderman, Viktor Timofeev, Theo Triantafyllidis
Sapieha Palace invites you to The Gathering of the ‘Breaking the Joints’ exhibition — a session of four presentations in which the exhibition’s curator Post Brothers, artists Viktor Timofeev and Theo Triantafyllidis, and animation researcher and curator Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman will present their creative and scholarly work, along with their recent projects.
The session will take place in the Events Hall (4th floor) of Sapieha Palace and will be held in English.
Admission to the event is free of charge. On 22 November, a discount will apply to tickets to the exhibition ‘Breaking the Joints’.
PROGRAMME:
12:30 Doors
13:00 Introduction
13:10 Post Brothers: It’s a Living
The representations of the body in ‘Breaking the Joints’ expose a tension at the heart of animation: between animated cartoons as a narrative of liberation, metamorphosis, and possibility, and animation as a cyclical mechanised disciplining of the body full of violence and bittersweet gags. This contradiction can also be seen in the production process itself, where seemingly anarchic activities manifest within the fragmented and rationalised logic of the assembly-line. This talk will consider the relationship between the labor of animators and the work of animated cartoon characters themselves, charting how these roles were negotiated throughout the Golden Age of animated shorts. Cartoons, as Norman M. Klein writes, are automata that struggle, and this talk will seek to uncover the toil and violence of their livelihood to better understand the labor power of the cartoon and to explore modes of resistance and solidarity in an uncertain world.
14:00 Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman
Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman’s presentation will discuss the status of contemporary images, with specific attention paid to animation, the history of rotoscoping, and the intrapsychic influence(s) of animated/cartoon violence. Our collective tracking and understanding of images—specifically, animated, “operationalized” images—has endured a paradigm shift. We will consider the laborer behind the animated “AI” image of now against the laborer of the early 21st century.
Is there a shared basis for certain pervasive imaging strategies, and if so, how do they influence the receiver and consequently describe what the body contains, or can contain? For example: what is behind the fantasy and logic of cartoon physics, where we internalize that to bend but not break, or to be destroyed and yet remain intact, is a profoundly unachievable relation to the world.
14:45-15:15 Break
15:15 Viktor Timofeev: Stairway to Melon
Viktor Timofeev makes paintings, videos, and installations that explore how personal experience connects to larger systems like technology, bureaucracy, and language.
16:00 Theo Triantafyllidis: Feral Systems
Theo Triantafyllidis builds performative systems that resist legibility. They stutter, overflow, and double back on themselves. In this artist talk, he presents a constellation of recent works – Feral Metaverse, Anti-Gone, BugSim (Pheromone Spa) – alongside in-progress experiments and behind-the-screens scaffolding, offering a look into a practice where simulation is treated as stage rather than spectacle.
These are moody, procedural worlds where engines stall, avatars drift off-script, and physics develop personalities. Triantafyllidis doesn’t design clean interactions, he cultivates volatile arrangements. Creatures, players, networks, and algorithms locked in uncertain liveness. This is not user-centered design. It’s the poetics of mutual misrecognition.
What emerges is a rehearsal space for unstable ontologies: somewhere between a LAN party, a fever dream, and a bad dress run of the future. A world where technology isn’t optimized, but embodied: intimate, leaky, semi-coherent, occasionally exquisite.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
POST BROTHERS is a critical enterprise that includes Matthew Post, an enthusiast, word processor, educator, and (co)dependent curator engaged in artist-oriented projects and critical fabulations. They live in Kolonia Koplany, a small village near Białystok in eastern Poland. From 2016-2019, Post Brothers was the curator at Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany, and from 2021-2023, they were an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. They have curated numerous exhibitions and projects across the world, and regularly publish essays in artist publications, exhibition catalogues, and art and cultural journals. They also participate in exhibitions with text-based and performative contributions, and lecture in art and educational contexts across Europe. In collaboration with Edgaras Gerasimovičius and Povilas Gumbis, they co-curated Breaking the Joints at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius in 2025, and are currently a Visiting Professor at Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland.
ELISAVETA ALEXANDROVNA SNEYDERMAN is a Belarusian-American curator, writer, and psychoanalyst. She is Assistant Director at KAJE, Curator at the Riga Technoculture Research Unit and Curator-at-Large at Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga. Shneyderman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the history and philosophy of media materialities and the techniques that emerge from them, including their influence on contemporary art.
Her essays on contemporary art and visual culture have been published in Artforum, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, e-flux, Hyundai Artlab, PIN-UP Magazine, Rhizome, and White Cube, among others. Shneyderman has previously held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, EMPAC, PARTICIPANT INC, Hunter East Harlem Gallery, KAJE, Kunsthalle.Ost, and Mana Contemporary, among others. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and is currently Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is a psychoanalyst in formation at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics.
VIKTOR TIMOFEEV is an artist from Riga, Latvia, now living in New York. His projects often take the form of theatrical environments that reflect on how people navigate rules and meaning, tracing the friction between inner worlds and shared realities.
Timofeev’s solo exhibitions: Other Passengers (Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, 2025), Pedagogical Games 1: Agents and Boundaries (Gallery 427, Riga, 2024), DOG (Interstate Projects, New York, 2021), God Objects (Karlin Studios / Futura, Prague, 2020), God Room (Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, 2018), and Stairway to Melon (Kim?, Riga, 2017). Group exhibitions: 1st Klaipėda Biennial Sunset Every Two Years (2025), Breaking the Joints (Sapieha Palace, Vilnius, 2025), New Address: Eden (Kim?, Riga, 2024), Tallinn Photography Month (2023), Digital Intimacy (National Gallery, Prague, 2021), 14th Baltic Triennial (ŠMC, Vilnius, 2021), and Unexpected Encounters (Latvian National Museum of Art, 2019).
THEO TRIANTAFYLLIDIS is an artist who works with digital and physical media to explore the experience of space and the mechanics of embodiment in hybrid realities. Utilizing algorithms and game engines, virtual reality headsets and experimental performance processes, he creates interactions within immersive environments. In Triantafyllidis’s worlds awkward interactions and precarious physics mingle with uncanny, absurd and poetic situations, inviting the viewer to engage with new realities.
Triantafyllidis holds an MFA from UCLA, Design Media Arts and a Diploma of Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens. He has shown work in museums, including the Whitney Museum in New York, Centre Pompidou in Metz, Buk-SEMA in Seoul, House of electronic Arts in Basel and NRW Forum in Dusseldorf and galleries such as Meredith Rosen Gallery, The Breeder, Nagel Draxler and Eduardo Secci. He was part of the 2021 Athens Biennale: Eclipse, Berliner Festspiele 2021, Sundance New Frontier 2020 and Hyper Pavilion in the 2017 Venice Biennale.