Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė & Lina LapelyteSun & Sea Listening House (2022)

In their collaborative practice, the artists Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė & Lina Lapelyte pay particular attention to the relationship between documentary and fiction, reality and poetry by overlapping theatre, music and the visual arts. Their first collaborative work, the contemporary opera Have a Good Day! for 10 cashiers, supermarket sounds and piano, premiered in 2013. In 2019, they represented Lithuania at the 58th Venice Biennale with the opera-performance Sun & Sea (Marina), which was awarded with the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė is a Vilnius-based filmmaker, theatre director and visual artist. In her creative practice, Barzdžiukaitė explores the gap between objective and imagined realities, while challenging an anthropocentric way of thinking in a playful way. Her recent full-length documentary film-essay Acid Forest was awarded at the Locarno International Film Festival among others, was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Lincoln Center in NYC, American Film Institute festival in LA and many other events and venues for cinema and contemporary art. Sun & Sea is her latest collaboration in the medium of performance.

Vaiva Grainytė is a writer, playwright and poet based in Lithuania. Her text-based practice shifts between genres, interdisciplinary theatre works and publications. In her work she acts as an observant anthropologist: challenged by Grainytė's poetic interpretation, mundane social issues take on a paradoxical and defamiliarised nature. Her book of essays Beijing Diaries (2012) and the poetry collection Gorilla’s Archives (2019) were nominated for the Book of the Year awards, and included in the top twelve listings of the most creative books in Lithuania. Her oeuvre has been translated into over 10 languages. Her bilingual, cross-genre novel, Roses and Potatoes (2022), playfully and phantasmagorically deconstructs the stereotypical concept of happiness embedded in contemporary culture.

Lina Lapelytė is a performance artist based in Lithuania. Her practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes and nostalgia. Lapelytė’s works engage trained and untrained performers often in an act of singing that takes the form of a collective and affective event questioning vulnerability and silencing. She had solo shows at FRAC, Nantes; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Rupert, Vilnius. Her works have been exhibited or performed at the 13th Kaunas biennial, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Tai Kwun, HK; Glasgow International; Riga Biennial - RIBOCA2; Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale; Cartier Foundation, Paris; CCA Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn; Moderna Museet, Malmö; FIAC, Paris; Hayward Gallery Touring, UK; Serpentine, London.