Akvilė Anglickaitė. Changing, It Rests

11 July – 12 October, 2025

Changing, It Rests brings together works by Akvilė Anglickaitė, created over several years specifically for this exhibition, including analogue photographs, videos, and drawings. The exhibition’s title refers to an enigmatic, ambiguous line in Fragments of Heraclitus (6th century BC), which paradoxically suggests that the world and all its phenomena are both in constant change, and in unity. 

 

This exhibition can be understood as a work that explores reality (one’s own surroundings, nature, time, context) and creative media. The artist distils certain elements (motifs, parameters) that are essential to each theme and instance, with the hope of gaining a fresh view on the subject and the medium itself. 

 

In a discussion on works with parametric strategies, such as films where recurring formal elements (camera movements, motifs, editing style and other parameters) form an additional layer of meaning, David Bordwell intriguingly noted that these works are characterised by ‘a richness of texture that resists interpretation’. Perhaps that is why the works in this exhibition have no titles (not even the usual Untitled). This can also be interpreted as a question: what and how can still and moving images communicate today when stripped of texts or labels that mediate their meaning? 

 

The wavy, intermittent line of her drawings echoes natural forms and patterns (tree bark, water bodies, etc.) and establishes a motif of circular motion that remains significant throughout the exhibit. The circle in turn becomes a labyrinth of deformed, imperfect symmetry, which also recurs in the exhibition’s two videos, slowly leading the viewer into disorientation or back to the starting point. To a Heraclitean, paradox-loving consciousness, everything takes the form of a circle: light and darkness, beginning and end overlap. 

 

All naturally occurring labyrinths and patterns reflect the time that shaped them. In the videos, light and nature burst into motion. They are edited in a way that eschews narrative and focuses on the parameters of motion, rhythm, and flow, which, alongside the slow, perpetual, cyclical time of nature, form dimensions of a fragmented past. Although the brick walls and the thickets are made up of solid, physical matter, the gaze of the camera transcends these boundaries easily, because these are worlds of memories woven from the fog and mists of the past. 

 

Since its invention, by its very nature, photography has been questioning Heraclitus’s claims – stepping into the same river twice, recreating fragments of a moment past. Light, a necessary element for photographic metamorphosis, can itself create or destroy images, burn in or scratch out its own abstract marks in the negative. It can also go unnoticed. However, even darkness can supply the prerequisites for thinking about the existence of light. 

 

Looking at the ephemeral flickers of light captured in the space of analogue film, dazzling flares within landscapes and beads of reflections, one feels as if looking at old, anachronistic artefacts extracted from subterranean darkness – is contemporary language still able to explain them?  

 

 

Text by: Tomas Genevičius 

Architect: Mindaugas Reklaitis 

Coordinating Architect: Aleksandras Kavaliauskas 

Graphic Designer: Marius Žalneravičius 

Translator: Paulius Balčytis 

Editor: Laura Patiomkinaitė 

 

Organiser: Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art 

The project is financed by: Lithuanian Council for Culture 

Sponsor: Vilnius Academy of Arts 

 

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Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
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