"Potentiality for Love" is the latest installation of Eija-Liisa Ahtila, created in 2018. It deals with the potential for empathy and love towards other living beings. It turns the attention to those human emotions that could serve as a foundation for dismantling the hierarchical structures between living things, thereby engendering a turn towards non-humans and the recognition of others. The work reflects the origins of these emotions, how we define them and how we conceive of their function as part of a larger continuum of living beings.

In the lecture, Eija-Liisa Ahtila will speak of her recent work and her working method. Her later works deal with profound and basic artistic questions where she investigates the processes of perception and attribution of meaning, at times in the light of a larger cultural and existential thematic like colonialism, faith and posthumanism. During the last decade she has sought to disengage moving image art from anthropocentrism and searched for ways to use the language of moving image to convey a relevant image of environmental change in this era of climate warming, overconsumption and mass extinction.

The event is part of the programme "Empathy for the Other. Exploring Mental Health through Art". The full programme can be found here.

The event will be held in English.

Admission is free of charge.

Opportunity Pass or EU Green Pass is required.

Registration to the guided tour: edukacija@ndg.lt. Places are limited.

For registration to the lecture, please, click here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-JD5iZj1J6-r65Tk_JaoaD6TgM2tGiz9PMNNISw9hQE/edit.

Organiser: National Gallery of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
Project financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture
Partners: Kaunas Artists' House, Šiauliai Art Gallery
Sponsors: Nordic Council of Ministers Office in Lithuania, Frame Contemporary Art