See The Unseen, For If You Don't, You'll Never See It Again
12 December, 2025 – 27 April, 2026
How much of a museum do you typically manage to see? And how much can you see? Eyes strain to penetrate beyond the entrance, to take in the vaults, halls and corridors, to survey and examine every artifact. We squint, scrutinizing every detail up close, or conversely, leisurely take in the whole. A museum, it seems, could not exist without the gaze, or at least feel alive, needed and relevant.
Yet invisibility also haunts the museum. Like the dark side of the moon—undoubtedly real, but invisible to eyes wandering through exhibition halls. These are the spaces closed to curious visitors—the museum’s storage facilities. Here, various artifacts, objects and works of art accumulate and are preserved: cultural valuables of different sizes, forms and contents. Visitors rarely gain entry here, and most often it is simply impossible.
A separate world hums away in storage facilities, with its own rules, customs and atmosphere. The museum’s collection is meticulously maintained, cataloged, organized, and studied. Storage facilities are also a kind of waiting room: some objects rest here after a long stint on display, others prepare for their moment of glory in a future exhibition, while still others wait like patients in a doctor’s office for restorers to receive them. Storage is also home to objects that have not seen exhibition lighting for decades—perhaps the artifact has not yet caught a curator’s eye, perhaps it preserves a memory that only distant generations will need, or perhaps it is simply too fragile to withstand a visitor’s gaze.
This exhibition, for the first time in the history of the Museum of Applied Arts and Design, a division of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, reflects the concept of visitable / open storage. Here you will see the museum’s collections laid out on shelves. You will encounter different collections from the Museum of Applied Arts and Design: furniture, ceramics, glass, porcelain, textiles, metal, and the “youngest” but highly diverse design collection. Here you can look around, wander, admire the abundance, search for and discover familiar or completely unknown artifacts, striking curiosities and puzzle-objects. Accent pieces from the collections—each with its own particular history—invite the eye to linger. Some are classics, works of applied arts and design that have already become icons; others are rarities not shown publicly for years.
What you see in the exhibition constitutes roughly half the physical contents of the Museum of Applied Arts and Design storage facilities. Due to the fragility of some exhibits, their specific storage or security requirements, we cannot show you absolutely everything. The displayed objects have been prepared for your gaze and await discovery.
Open and visitable storage is a concept combining two cornerstone museum functions: preservation and display. Unlike a traditional exhibition with its didactic narrative, this type of exhibition can be viewed from various angles according to your own inclinations: browsed like a three-dimensional encyclopedia, curated into a personal exhibition of favorites, or explored through serendipity—letting your eye wander among objects until something particularly alluring catches your attention, prompting closer acquaintance and surprise. This non-traditional exhibition represents a conscious and motivated step by the museum, seeking to open itself to the visitor’s gaze more boldly than ever before. And for you, the visitor, this is a rare opportunity to see through the museum’s walls, to experience what is usually invisible but preserved and cherished by us all.
Over 70,000 exhibits have been accumulated in the Museum of Applied Arts and Design storage facilities.
Furniture: ~1,500 exhibits
Design: ~5,000 exhibits
Historical textiles: ~2,400 exhibits
Ceramics: ~8,000 exhibits
Metal: ~3,000 exhibits
Porcelain: ~1,600 exhibits
Glass: ~900 exhibits
Textiles: ~3,300 exhibits
Archaeology: ~5,000*
Numismatics: ~40,000*
Leather: ~1,000*
* collections not displayed in the exhibition
Project director Džiuljeta Žiugždienė
Curators: Živilė Intaitė, Julijus Balčikonis, Monika Gedrimaitė
Collection curators: Jūratė Meilūnienė, Nijolė Žilinskienė, Gražina Gurnevičiūtė, Monika Gedrimaitė, Giedrė Uzielienė, Eglė Pinkutė
Architect Eglė Jagminė
Designers: Rūta Ivaškevičiūtė, Jonas Liugaila
Lighting designer Simas Rinkevičius
Coordinator Mažvydas Truklickas
Consultants: dr. Algė Andriulytė, dr. Dainius Labeckis
Media partners: LRT, JCDecaux, Cgates
Special thanks to: Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, Aušrinė Mačėnienė, Mantas Markevičius, Tomas Orlovas, Laura Patiomkinaitė, Elena Prokopavičienė, Rasa Bieliauskaitė-Mikolaitienė, Lina Ona Adomaitytė, Audronė Petroševičiūtė, Elena Jazbutienė, Rima Tagonidzė, Austėja Janušaitė, Arūnas Baublys, Darius Varnas, Rimvydas Derkintis, Česlovas Petrauskas, Justas Bajoras, Augustinas Viršilas, Ričardas Pacauskas, Audrius Janušonis, Lithuanian Central State Archives, Lithuanian National Museum, Vilnius Academy of Art.
- Purchase an e-ticket for this exhibition
- Book a guided tour by phone +370 5 212 1813, +370 5 262 8080
- Plan your visit to the Museum of Applied Arts And Design
3A Arsenalo st, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 212 1813;
+370 5 261 25 48; +370 5 262 80 80.
tddm@lndm.lt
