A party in a shelter, art amidst weapons: Jurga Barilaitė’s exhibition at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art

Exhibition opening at 6 pm on Thursday, 13 November, 2025

At 6 pm Thursday, 13 November, the Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the LNMA opens a solo exhibition by Jurga Barilaitė, titled Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Weapons and Shelters. The artist brings together her previously produced artwork and a site-specific installation created for the event at the Radvila Palace museum on the theme of historical crises and war.  

 

 

The dauntless artist of a stunning imagination  

 

“Today, the contemporary Lithuanian art stage is inconceivable without Jurga Barilaitė. Since her debut in the 90s, the artist has produced iconic pieces defining the character of Lithuanian contemporary art. She has come to contribute her strong and authentic women artist’s voice to the Lithuanian visual discourse and carries on her narratives on the matters universally significant and painful with an unrelenting defiance, attractive punk candidness together with subtle empathy,” says Justina Augustytė, director of the Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the LNMA.     

 

The output from the rebellious artist strikes with the broadness of emotion and a variety of themes – from memory and conflict, to punk life style and feminism. Barilaitė majored in painting at Vilnius Academy of Arts, but never since has she limited herself to a single medium. Her artistic practice combines video, performance, text and installation to produce works where the artist relies on a different means of expression from text to her own body.  

 

She embarked on her path by critique on painting and embraced action, or gestural, painting for her early artistic statements. Among her best acclaimed early appearance is Self-Defence (2001, known also as Necessary Defence). Eighteen-minute-video shows the artist attacking the wall, punching and punching it, in boxing gloves smeared in white paint, to reveal a baby face. Her entire art vibrates with the potent imagery and shocking contrast she uses in the treatment of those uncomfortable themes bordering on tabu. The artist intensely exhibits her work in solo shows and group events in Lithuania and abroad, while this new appearance is Barilaitė’s first solo project for the LNMA.     

 

 

New exhibition – post-apocalyptic shelters and humour  

 

Weapons and Shelters is the last exhibition from the series Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Like the entire project, it weaves together the eternal themes of existence and decay with the pressing present-day challenges of war and survival, punctuated by the fragments of fantastic stories and cryptic rituals. This event combines a new installation created for the Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the LNMA and a kind of retrospective, which embraces the artist’s production of over five past years. The Weapons and Shelters finalize Barilaitė’s trilogy, which started with the Bones and Sediment (gallery Artiflex, 2019), continued with the Lines and Wrinkles (project space Atletika, 2021) and has been expanded by different individual pieces. Brought together in the rooms of the Radvila Palace, these works will emerge in a new light with new functions of ritual, memory, humour and resistance, inviting the visitors to join in a shelter party.      

 

„The exhibition started with the ruminations on the experience of family women in historical crises, with thinking on occupations, persecution and the absurdity of fighting. Then my old and new ideas intertwined bringing out new colours in the artwork, sprouting with new fantasies – the dreams of the living and delusions of the dead have no real end, there is no way separating them,” the artist shares her concept of the exhibition.  

 

Visitors moving across the rooms of the Radvila Palace will be able to experience both, pre-and-post-historic realities simultaneously: these chopped heads, mysterious urns, skeletons of dragons may as well pass as elements of the beginning – or the end – of the world. In the exhibition, the artist creates an environment of a post-apocalyptic shelter, where mingled together are signs of progress or regress, where her old and newly-produced works claim equal attention as do the motifs of war, of digital gothics, of death and vitality. Barilaitė’s take on the bitter present-day issues is infused with humour, hope and profuse energy as they appear in a vibrant and active setting the artist has designed to present her subject-matter.     

 

„The exhibition manifests a singular artistic mentality and method of Barilaitė, political and enchanted, ironic and tragic. It was important to fulfil her vision to a detail, in order all the facets of the artis get revealed to the public,” Monika Kalinauskaitė, curator of the event, comments on the exhibition.     

 

Curator-and-artist guided tour of the exhibition will be held on November 15, shortly following the opening of Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Information on other related events will be posted on the LNMA website and social media. 

 

 

The exhibition at the Radvila Palace Museum of the LNMA will run through 15 March 2026.  

 

 

Team of the exhibition Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Weapons and Shelters  

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  

Copyeditor Laura Patiomkinaitė 

Special thanks to: Exhibit Display Division of the LNMA: Vadimas Šamkovas, Danas Aleksa, Kazys Sližys  

 

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

See also

Exhibition

Jurga Barilaitė. Dreams of the Living and Delusions of the Dead. Weapons and Shelters