This special screening, part of the ‘Moving Images at Sapieha Palace’ programme, is presented in collaboration with ‘Deep Rivers Run Silent’ – a series of summer screenings and events. Lina Lapelytė’s new works will be shown at the Railway Hangar of the Vilnius Railway Museum, Pelesos g. 10.
Based in Vilnius and London, Lina Lapelytė is an artist whose performance-based practice is grounded in musical composition and sound. Her work critically engages with constructs of pop culture, gender norms, and collective memory, particularly nostalgia.
Programme:
The Speech | 2024 | 21 min
Having devoted considerable attention to language in recent years, Lapelytė has been exploring its limitations. To her, language increasingly appears as a tool of manipulation, prompting a search for alternative forms of communication, such as care and attentiveness to others, non-human life, and the environment. Created for the Festival d’Automne à Paris, The Speech takes a radical approach by erasing all linguistic references. Nearly one hundred local children create a live sound sculpture, ‘speaking’ through imitated animal sounds. The work reflects on the failure of language, human fragility, empathy, imitation as a way of learning, and the unheard voices of the marginalised. While seemingly playful, the performance highlights a child’s still-forming sense of self, where the line between ‘I’ and ‘other’ is not yet clearly defined. Lapelytė’s delicate, ephemeral intervention envisions a primordial world where humans and animals are still taking shape, inviting the audience to listen to a chimeric chorus of familiar and abstract sounds.
In the Dark, We Play | 2025 | 36:36 min
In the Dark, We Play is a site-specific performative video work by Lina Lapelytė, created in collaboration with Nouria Bah, Anat Ben-David, Angharad Davies, Sharon Gal, Rebecca Horrox, and Martynas Norvaišas. Filmed inside The Cosmic House – Charles Jencks’ former London home and a postmodern architectural manifesto – the work turns the space into a living stage for a polyphonic encounter between sound, architecture, and layered histories.
Drawing from William Stok’s Cultural History Frieze, which charts a lineage of thinkers from Imhotep to Hannah Arendt, the piece reflects on humanity’s ongoing search for meaning. However, rather than offering grand narratives, it foregrounds the personal, the mundane, and the poetic as equally significant forces.
Through a series of filmed musical and performative fragments, the work navigates cosmic and philosophical themes by juxtaposing the intellectual with the sensory, the historical with the contemporary. Performers move through the space like orbiting bodies – sometimes lingering with symbolic details, sometimes passing with fleeting gestures – creating a rhythm of presence, attention, and ambiguity.
The works will be screened in the original language with Lithuanian subtitles.
Total duration: 57 minutes.
The screening is free of charge.
Through the incorporation of both professional and untrained performers, Lina Lapelytė explores vocal expression across diverse musical traditions, including popular music and opera. These performative acts of singing are conceived as collective, affective experiences that interrogate notions of vulnerability, voice, and the mechanisms of silencing within social and cultural frameworks.
Lapelytė’s works were shown at Festival d’Automne/Bourse de Commerce, Paris (2024); Public Art Munich (2024); Wiener Festwochen (2023); FRAC, Nantes (2022); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2022); SPACE, London (2022); Gherdeina Biennale (2022); Zurcher Theater Spektakel (2022); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); 13th Kaunas Biennial (2021); BAM, NY (2021); MOCA, Los Angeles (2021); Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels (2021); Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2021); Glasgow International (2021); Riga Biennial RIBOCA2 (2020); Cartier Foundation, Paris (2019); Venice Biennial, Venice (2016 & 2019); Waiting for another coming, CCA Ujazdowski, Warsaw (2018); Pirouette, Rupert (2017); Magma, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2017); Moderna Museet, Malmo (2017); FIAC, Paris (2017); Peculiar People, Focal Point Gallery.