Janina Sabaliauskaitė. Pleasure

23 May – 28 September 2025


Pleasure eludes description. It hides within the body awaiting the decisive moment – a warm day, a sweet kiss, or a creative surge. Pleasure liberates us from duties and roles uniting us with others experiencing it. Despite attempts of various industries to price and exploit it, pleasure in its essence remains authentic and uncontrollable, and wonderfully paradoxical – to experience it, we must be deeply vulnerable and exceptionally safe simultaneously.

 

Janina Sabaliauskaitė is an experienced photographer of pleasure. The images she creates typically reveal the connections and joys of the LGBTQ+ community, queer love, and everyday life suffused with intimacy. The foundation of this work is an authentic relationship with her subjects, allowing the bodies captured in photographs to pulse with life. In the artist’s new exhibition, we find ourselves surrounded by the pleasures of Živilė, Lina, Alexandra, Julius, Tanya, Laura K., Simonas, Eglė, Žygimantas, Laura S., and Ernesta. In a year-long project, they shared sensitive and powerful moments, disclosed primarily through conversation. Conversations about self-love, desire, eroticism, attraction, capabilities, dreams, challenges. About longings and possibilities. Layer by layer, revealing a new facet of life, a new boundary of beauty, and revealing their sexuality.

 

Sexuality is another force that is difficult to describe, beginning certainly not with the removal of clothing. It would seem that this should be the most private and most protected area of life, yet in various societies, it is affected by hundreds of myths and restrictions. Advertising and propaganda images can sickeningly prescribe correct sexuality, permissible only to certain proportions, forms, and faces. Laws and social agreements can separate bodies from other bodies, from their inner force. However, only nurtured, flourishing sexuality allows the creation of mutual harmony, a space where it is possible both to make love and to converse, where there is room for trust, respect, and curiosity. Such space is not guaranteed in society, at least not for everyone. People with disabilities are still most often imagined beyond the boundaries of that space.

 

Life with disability, dysfunction, and individual needs is just as diverse and unpredictable as any other. However, a large part of these lives unfolds in society’s shadow. The structural separation of people with disabilities begins not with creation, but with the quiet, lazy conviction that full-fledged existence – communication, movement, sex, culture, entertainment – must be organised according to a template of straight, mobile, far-sighted standard, feeling neither pain nor weakness. Probably pleasure is not included either – for what template can truly enjoy the skin of the other, a slow afternoon in a museum, or a piquant taste? The world of templates is not sexual; a museum of templates is uncomfortable and boring. But pleasure and love are experienced by diverse bodies. Both on good and painful days, both working with their bodies’ individual features and disregarding them, both with eyes and nipples, both inside and visibly. In all ways that one curator‘s eloquence cannot encompass.

 

In Janina Sabaliauskaitė’s exhibition, disability and sexuality merge into a unified silver surface. This is the tone that, in the long history of Lithuanian photography, has coloured various faces, among which now appear the people who opened themselves to this project. Its gleam is highlighted by words placed alongside the portraits – personal stories and thoughts on sexuality. These thoughts are also presented on the exhibition’s virtual platform together with photograph descriptions and participants‘ biographies – in large text and audio recording format. We hope this will make the exhibition and museum experience accessible to all our visitors, and allow them to experience pleasure within it.

Monika Kalinauskaitė

 

 

Organizers: Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the LNMA, VšĮ Menininkių projektai

Project funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Project participants: Živilė Bagdonavičiūtė, Lina Bastytė, Alexandra Gushcha, Julius and Tanya, Laura K., Simonas Kriaučiūnas, Eglė Kučinskienė, Žygimantas Menčenkovas, Laura S., Ernesta Žemaitytė

Curator Monika Kalinauskaitė

Coordinator Audrius Jerašius

Graphic designer Domantas Pigulevičius

 

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Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824

See also

Exhibition opening

Pleasure – Janina Sabaliauskaitė’s exhibition about disability and sexuality at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art