Vsevolod Kovalevskij’s Margins.Miracles at the National Gallery of Art
Exhibition opening at 6 pm Friday, 22 May, 2026
On the 22nd of May, the National Gallery of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art opened Vsevolod Kovalevskij’s exhibition ‘Margins. Miracles’. This most recent project by artist brings together his personal archives, popular media imagery, and urban memory into a spatial narrative exploring the LGBTQIA+ community, fear, and the right of stories to be visible.
Vilnius, London, Oslo – personal ‘Pride’ archives become a large-scale comic drawing
The first Baltic Pride march in Vilnius in 2010 serves as a reference point to the exhibition’s narrative, which evolves into a tapestry of events personally experienced by the artist across Vilnius, London, and Oslo. Photographic works, excerpts from media reports, drawings, and layers of memory are woven into a monumental comic-style piece covering the 194-square-metre perimeter of the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition space.
The artist’s choice of the comic book aesthetic seeks to dissolve the line between dry documentary reporting and emotional experience or fiction. The comic drawing of unorthodox scale serves to create an all-encompassing visual experience, allowing visitors to feel like insiders to the story. A triangle-shaped platform – a key component of the exhibition – evokes the dark history of the symbol as a badge of stigma and dehumanisation of the LGBTQIA+ community, used in Nazi concentration camps to mark homosexual men. Kovalevskij performs a gesture of symbolical reclamation by turning the pink triangle, once a symbol of oppression, into a platform for queer voices, performances, and being together.
‘When we first took part in Baltic Pride in Vilnius, simply being out on the street did not feel safe. After sixteen years, it is important to me to revisit these scenes not for the sake of nostalgia, but because they should not be approached as personal memories only. I wanted to carve out a space for the things that used to be marginalised and bring them – unapologetically – to the public eye,’ Kovalevskij says.
Following the 2010 Baltic Pride march in Vilnius, where police outnumbered the participants and the scandalising acts of some politicians were deeply engraved into collective memory, Kovalevskij took part in the 2018 Pride march in London, and the 2022 march in Oslo. All of these occasions were not only experiences of community, but also of provocation and antagonism – in Oslo, even gunfire. The memories and the archives of the artist, as he symbolically revisits these game-changing events, evoke the reality of fear and trauma, as well as solidarity and the refusal to remain silent.
The culmination of a mature creative practice
Vsevolod Kovalevskij (also known as Seva) is an artist and curator born in Vilnius, living between Lithuania and Norway. His work encompasses moving image, installations, textiles, photography, and performed spaces. He studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art, and Goldsmiths, University of London. He also participated in the Rupert educational programme. His work has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, the Contemporary Art Centre, Vartai Gallery, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Tromsø Kunstforening, as well as other art institutions in Lithuania and abroad. Kovalevskij was one of the initiators of the ‘Young Poor Artists’ collective and directed the project spaces Malonioji 6 and Sodų 4 of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association in Vilnius. He also founded the mobile art space ‘InTheCloset’.
The exhibition ‘Margins & Miracles’ is a landmark in Kovalevskij’s career – the artist’s mature artistic idiom, curatorial mentality, and personal story have come together to produce a powerfully ambitious interdisciplinary project presented by the National Gallery of Art.
The rights of LGBTQIA+ community in Lithuania remain subject to intense public and political debate. Homosexual relations were decriminalised in 1993, but the questions of partnership, family, and protection from discrimination still await a comprehensive legal settlement. Given this context, the exhibition ‘Margins. Miracles’ speaks not only to personal experience, but also to the issues of human rights.
The exhibition ‘Margins & Miracles’ runs until the 13 of September 2026 at the National Gallery of Art.
The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art
of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
The artistic production is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
Sponsor OCA
Coordinators: Goda Aksamitauskaitė, Giedrius Gulbinas
Graphic Designer Ugnė Balčiūnaitė
Exhibition Design Producer Mindaugas Reklaitis
Copy-editor Emma Stirling
Acknowledgements: William A. F. Bentsen, Anouk De Clercq, Tomas Kirša, Svetlana Kovalevskaja, Erwin De Muer, Greta Vileikytė
- Purchase an e-ticket for this exhibition
- Book a guided tour of this exhibition by phone +370 5 219 5961, email edukacija@ndg.lt
- Plan your visit to the National Gallery of Art
22 Konstitucijos Ave, LT-08105, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 212 2997,
info@ndg.lt
www.ndg.lt
