Jurga Barilaitė. Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Weapons and Shelters
13 November 2025 – 15 March 2026
All our secrets begin with the alphabet
Sound and letter
Our weapons and shelters
It is with these lines that Jurga Barilaitė began a new creative cycle in 2019, titled Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. There is probably no need to list everything that has happened since then—the only thing that has remained unchanged is the alphabet, the one we use to record our secrets and our pain, the one we turn to first when seeking shelter from the anxiety that shakes the air.
Jurga Barilaitė is a unique artist in the history of contemporary Lithuanian art. She is instinctive, vivid, defiant. Unsettlingly delightful, charged with an almost tangible libidinal energy, her works resist classification. In one of her early works, Necessary Defence, she attacks the canvas with her fists, reclaiming her story from its clutches as if from an oppressor. The artist here is neither a soldier nor a strategist, but something more dangerous: a street fighter who simply cannot be disarmed. Today, the small flickering figure on that VHS tape seems almost unreal, like a character from an old computer game—a game about girl power, strength, and a future without painting. The kind of game one would be glad to finish, because even when your own knuckles are bloodied, the immortal heroine will still be ready to fight for you. Yet unlike video game characters, artists grow. ‘Hand me the sword, sister,’ calls the woman wielding a machete, cutting through fruits and staring at the viewer with an unwavering gaze. She has matured alongside her medium, her weapons, her creative and moral code: if you want to cut something, you must first create it. And even after cutting, you must continue to create—to glaze, to fire, to exhibit. To offer something fresh to the void, or to whoever has no dish to store their nuts.
Formally, Weapons and Shelters is the final exhibition in the Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead cycle. It concludes a trilogy that began with Bones and Sediment (Artifex Gallery, 2019), continued with Lines and Wrinkles (Atletika, 2021), and expanded through numerous works, concepts, texts, and reflections. Yet this ending feels less like a full stop than an eternity. In the halls of the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, new works join an already unfolding story, while older ones come alive for yet another party. Bones begin to dance, heads open up and weapons clatter—and suddenly it becomes clear that this story has always had dragons. One of them lies decomposing on the ground, inviting us into its video belly. Ursula Le Guin, author of Earthsea, once wrote that no one in the world can explain a dragon, not even in the universe that she created, where dragons lived and could speak. What about here? I have repeated Le Guin’s words many times, both in thought and in writing, yet I still do not know how to stop dragons from hovering endlessly above, roaring about war, plague, or planetary decline. Perhaps their skeletons will preserve all our screens with their endlessly looping jokes and tales—as if rehearsing this scenario, Barilaitė turns the exhibition rooms into a self-consuming loop.
Weapons and Shelters began with uneasy associations and memories—of funerals in Siberia, the experience of surviving the Holocaust due to one’s stuttering, a mother with a dichlorvos spray can during the bloodshed of 13 January events, aerial photographs from spy planes and drones attacked by crows. Within Barilaitė’s creative world, it seems both fitting and poetic that these transformed into dreams, visions, fantasies, and bodies, highlighting the strangeness of a world we could probably never truly recreate in our shelters. Walking through the exhibition spaces, one feels simultaneously at the beginning and at the end of humankind—blades, mysterious urns, skeletons, and nests could belong equally to the world’s creation and its extinction. Both scenarios defy comprehension, even for the most sensitive of minds. But not for Barilaitė, whose gaze paints this post-militarist nightmare in rainbow hues. Like all street kids, Barilaitė stands out for her imagination and curiosity. Her works evoke the world of a child on the verge of growing up, that threshold where desire is no longer alien, yet taboo does not exist. In such a world, everything can coexist—body, violence, tears, beauty. And it can still be untested and wrong—unable to fit within the demands of perfect feminism, perfect politics, perfect pacifism. In a way, Barilaitė’s art represents the childhood of culture, the phase we try to shake off in our country, striving to appear respectable and enviable. Our sparkle is only possible because, once, there was a struggle for survival—not fought with flags and ranks alone, but with mud, glitter, throats, and rhymes. A politically incorrect struggle—one that is not necessarily for the homeland. Not always for a cause. And not entirely for oneself either.
Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Weapons and Shelters is Jurga Barilaitė’s first solo exhibition at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. In curating it, I experienced how closely struggle and creation intertwine, and how endless every woman artist’s necessary defence truly is. Even when the air trembles with anxiety, I feel safe in Jurga’s shelter. Here, there is someone fighting for us, guarding the alphabet day and night—even when only a dream remains of the living, and only the dead are still capable of dreaming.
Team of the exhibition Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead
Artist Jurga Barilaitė
Curator: Monika Kalinauskaitė
Coordinator Audrius Jerašius
Architect Edita Valaitė
Coordinating Architect Aleksandras Kavaliauskas
Graphic Designer Marija Jablonskytė
Communication Coordinator Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė
Translator Martynas Galkus
Editor Laura Patiomkinaitė
Special Thanks To: Exhibit Display Division of the LNMA: Vadim Šamkov, Danas Aleksa, Kazys Sližys
- Purchase an e-ticket for this exhibition
- Book a guided tour of this exhibition by phone +370 616 16550, email radvilos.ekskursijos@lndm.lt
- Plan your visit to the Radvila Palace Art Museum
Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824
