Aurelija Maknytė’s exhibition ‘Channels’

On 24 July at 6 pm, the exhibition 'Channels' by Aurelija Maknytė will open in the Great Hall of the National Gallery of Art (NGA, Konstitucijos Ave. 22, Vilnius), part of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA). 

This exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of the artist's work, surveying an artistic practice spanning nearly three decades and showcasing both well-known pieces and works that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before. 

Maknytė is one of the most distinctive figures in Lithuanian contemporary art. Her creative practice constantly intertwines the history of everyday life, nature, and technologies. Although her works emerge from daily observation, collecting, documentation, and years of research, they rarely result in finished exhibits. Incompleteness, process, and the opportunity to continually rethink accumulated material are among the key principles of Maknytė's work. 

One of the exhibition's main themes is light. In the NGA's Great Hall, natural daylight meets the light emitted by television screens, electric bulbs, and flickering video projections. Fragments of Maknytė's series Light Therapy I-III - recreated especially for this exhibition - reveal the artist's long-standing interest in light as both a prerequisite for the emergence of the technological image and as an artistic medium in its own right. 

Television and television sets constitute an equally important part of Maknytė's body of work. For over a decade, the artist amassed a personal television archive, recording excerpts of television programmes and films onto VHS tapes and using them to create video works, fictional autobiographies, and new narratives. For her, television was not merely a source of imagery, but also a form of cultural memory. The exhibition also revisits the experimental project CAC TV, in which Maknytė was involved as a camera operator, editor, and creative contributor. 

The exhibition also reveals another important direction in the artist's work: archives and collections. VHS tapes, photographic films, floppy disks, slides, video recordings, and found objects accumulated over decades become not only repositories of memory, but also potential artworks. In Maknytė's practice, collecting is not merely a form of documentation; it is a way to think about the world and forge new connections between seemingly unrelated things. 

Nature plays a pivotal role in the exhibition. Observations of plants, animals, and the landscape, conducted over many years on the plot of land by the Širvinta River that the artist calls 'Earth', become an integral part of her creative work. Objects derived from the natural environment are displayed in the courtyard of the NGA, while a replica of the Main Hall has been constructed on the banks of the Širvinta River especially for the exhibition. 

Aurelija Maknytė (b. 1969) is a Lithuanian artist living between Vilnius and the Širvintos district. In the early 1990s, she studied design at the Telšiai Higher School of Applied Arts and later completed the then-newly established Bachelor's and Master's programmes in Photography and Media Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Maknytė has frequently participated in exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, including the 'Parallel Progressions' cycle (2001-2003), the international performance festival 'Dimension 1' (2006), 'Art Pause' (2002), '101.3 km: Competition and Cooperation' (2006), 'Urban Stories. X Baltic Triennial of International Art' (2009), 'Lithuanian Art 2000-2010: Ten Years' (2010), 'The Nineties' (2012), 'Lithuanian Art 2012: 18 Exhibitions' (2012), and 'Blood and Soil: Dark Arts for Dark Times' (2019). Maknytė's work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as 'Loose Ends' at the National Gallery of Art (NDG, 2019), 'The Sweet Sweat of the Future' (NDG, 2019), 'The Origin of Species: 1990s DNA' at the MO Museum (2019), 'Chronometers' at the Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KKKC, 2018), and 'The Body of the Letter' at the Sodų 4 project space (2016), among others. To date, she has held three solo exhibitions: 'Parents' Room' (Artifex), 'Deficit' (Gallery 101) (both in 2015), and 'Cabinets of Nature' at the Vilnius Town Hall (2020). Her works are held in the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and the MO Museum.

Curators: Inesa Brašiškė, Agnė Narušytė 
Architect Beatričė Mockevičiūtė 
Graphic Designer Jonė Miškinytė 
Sponsor Exterus: Fundermax 
Partner Meno avilys 
Media partners: Delfi, JCDecaux 
Exhibition Organiser LNMA National Gallery of Art