Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis

Foreword

Agnė Narušytė, Skaidra Trilupaitytė — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Security narratives are relevant to us both in geopolitical contexts and in everyday life, whose events, according to the writer Olga Tokarczuk, are shaped by networks of subjective meanings. These networks form a fabric of ideas, concepts, and stories that may be considered one of the elements—alongside air, earth, fire, and water—that determine our physical existence and shape us as living beings. In the 121st volume of Acta Acad emiae Artium Vilnensis, art historians, critics, philosophers, and artists reconsider both the traditional and the emerging boundaries of a world marked by (in)security, as well as historical and contemporary dystopian impasses. Living in the present, we sense that not only the societies of previous centuries but also those of the twenty-first century are experiencing a crisis of imagination, one in which the future no longer appears clear or pre dictable. From a geopolitical perspective, for example, the seemingly concrete boundaries of land and air are often unstable. The notion of a state capable of protecting its citizens, together with political maps and territorial borders, can collapse for a variety of reasons. Today, the traditional contours of a secure life are challenged not only by international politics but also by biopolitical realities. New threats compel us to reconsider the perceived boundaries of corporeality, particularly when confronted with human actors or microorganisms that disregard national borders and airspace, as well as with the consequences of demographic crises and migration. Inflammation and contagion can affect not only biological bodies or digital systems but also the Earth itself, which appears to develop its own forms of immune response. Even homes that once seemed comfortable or at least safe may suddenly become unfamiliar and alien spaces.

Images of War: Between Secrecy and the Iconic Documentary

Skaidra Trilupaitytė — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Review of the book: Natalija Arlauskaitė, sud. Vizualumo sąsiuviniai. Karas. Lapas, 2025. 344 p. ISBN 978-609-496-019-2

“Polluted and Insalubrious Air”: Environment, Pollution, and Sanitation in Vilnius in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century

Martynas Jakulis — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The article examines how the Neo-Hippocratic idea—that foul airs rising from street refuse, the sick, and the dead caused illness—developed in Vilnius during the second half of the eighteenth century, and what measures were taken by the city’s elites to respond to this problem. The study focuses on three distinct segments of the city’s space that were associated with pollution: streets, squares, and other public spaces clogged with dung and refuse, hospitals overflowing with patients, as well as burial crypts and cemeteries around the city’s churches where decomposing bodies were believed to emit “noxious fumes.” Drawing on a wide range of primary sources—including the documents of the city’s council, health care reform and poor relief records of various institutions, sermons, newspapers, and didactic treatises—the research reveals that “foul air” alarmed both secular elites and the Catholic clergy. The measures taken to combat the problem were aimed at physically removing pollution sources from the city. Dung and other refuse gathered from public spaces were transported to dumping sites outside the city. A new general hospital in the Lukiškės suburb relocated patients with sexually transmitted diseases, as well as the poor and beggars, from densely populated areas. A suburban cemetery was established to reduce burials in church crypts and urban graveyards. Thus, the Neo-Hippocratic environmental ideas significantly reshaped both the daily lives of Vilnius’s inhabitants and the city’s physical landscape.

How to Get Down to Earth? Earthbounding Practices in the Works of Aurelija Maknytė

Audronė Žukauskaitė — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The article analyses the practices of earthbounding in the artworks and artistic projects of Aurelija Maknytė. Earthbounding is understood as a newly configured relationship with the Earth, which here refers simultaneously to the planet, the theoretical concept, and a material site that provides resources for artistic production. Maknytė’s artistic projects are considered practices of earthbounding in several respects: first, they seek to overcome the division between nature and culture and create hybrids and chimeras; second, earthbounding is expressed through acts of recording and rewriting memories, opening up transindividual and transgenerational temporalities; third, it is expressed through practices of interspecies collaboration that connect the observer with other life forms and enable a non-human perspective on the Earth. This reconfiguration creates a new relationship with the Earth and invites a critical reconsideration of distinctions within theoretical discourse, such as those between globalisation and the Anthropocene, or between the global image of the Earth and the Earth as a planet. Based on the ideas of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Bruno Latour, the article proposes to conceive of the Earth as an assemblage in which geological, biological, and technological temporalities overlap. The Earth emerges as a habitat for earthbound and earthbounded inhabitants, where biological symbioses, technological hybrids, and new forms of transindividual subjectivity coexist. The work of art becomes a medium of this new transindividual subjectivity, establishing earthbounding as a new ontological mode of existence.

A Look at the (Un)Safe Sky: Unrecognised Phenomena, Visions, and Contemporaneous Technologies

Skaidra Trilupaitytė — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The cultural imagination of the sky is shaped by the interplay between faith and rational thought, as well as by the evolving possibilities of human vision (seeing) under the influence of optical technologies. Historically, the credibility of seeing was grounded in religious traditions; in modernity, it has been reconfigured by the natural sciences, which argue that perception is not a direct function of the eyes alone but is mediated by complex cognitive processes in the brain. The sky is commonly associated with the “natural” upward orientation of the gaze, as well as with culturally and religiously encoded images. Yet any attempt to define its boundaries or scale inevitably reveals conceptual gaps. Efforts to produce ever more precise explanations of rare atmospheric “miracles” thus expose the fragility of human knowledge. In everyday experience, the sky is observed from a specific geographical position, always partial and situated. At the same time, its limits feel unstable: questions of (un)safety and boundedness persist precisely because objective knowledge and subjective perception continually intersect. The reliability of extraordinary visions can sometimes be institutionally validated by the Church, as in the case of the Marian apparitions at Fátima in 1917, which were officially recognised as miraculous decades later. In the second half of the twentieth century, accounts of extraterrestrial entities and “alien spaceships” became consolidated within the popular mythology of UFOs. More recently, these phenomena have been reframed as still-unexplained, i.e., unidentified anomalous or paranormal phenomena—so-called unidentified aerial phenomena. Increasingly sophisticated observational instruments extend the limits of vision beyond human capacity, enabling access to phenomena previously unthinkable—such as observations concerning the beginning of time. Such anomalies, whether detected by terrestrial instruments or witnessed by pilots in orbital and aerospace flight, open up strange intersections between cosmology, new military secrets and contemporary research into unidentified aerial phenomena of various kinds.

Drawing on the history of vision technologies and insights from cultural and religious theory, this text examines the (un)security of the sky. The overview of Western cultural imagination is complemented by selected works of Lithuanian art from the 20th and 21st centuries, including God Perkūnas by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1909), the photo-collage series Civilisations by Vitalijus Butyrinas (1983), and Kristina Inčiūraitė’s three-photograph and audio work Anna and the Phantom (2016). The discussion also incorporates a visionary experience reported by Artūras Raila in the early 1970s, reconstructed more than two decades afterward in his moving-image work Primeval Sky (as the artist notes: “In 2002, I tried to visualise the phenomena seen in 1980”). The analysis further emphasises how the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has produced an unprecedented militarisation of the sky. Through the deployment of advanced military and surveillance technologies—above all drones—the sky is increasingly configured as a contested threat sphere, exposing the fragility of nation-state borders. Within this framework, the selected works of modern and contemporary Lithuanian art function not only as objects of art-historical interpretation but also as visual and rhetorical figures through which shifting vectors of perception and subjective optics can be critically examined.

Cruel Beauty: Cinematic Representations of Nuclear Explosions

Narius Kairys — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The first atomic bomb test, conducted on July 16, 1945, in New Mexico, USA, was captured on film. Over time, the “mushroom cloud” has become a widely recognisable iconographic image, endlessly produced, reproduced, and disseminated across cinematic genres and styles. Yet, cinema itself prompts a simple yet critical question for our time: What do we see—and what do we want to see—when watching a nuclear explosion on screen? This paper explores the aesthetic modes that cinema employs to depict nuclear explosions, their role in visual culture, and how they shape our perception of nuclear weapons and their potential consequences. The analysis focuses on three films that use distinct cinematic strategies to represent and convey the experience of nuclear detonations: Isao Hashimoto’s 1945–1998 (2003), Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976), and an episode from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (Season 3, Episode 8, Gotta Light?), which portrays the first atomic bomb test in the United States. Hashimoto’s film eschews the iconographic image of a nuclear explosion, instead rendering nuclear history as a chain of signals—an abstract quantitative visualisation he argues is the only way to grasp its full scale. Conner, by re-editing found footage of Operation Crossroads, immerses the viewer in a ritual of repeated world destruction, aiming to reshape their perception of the atomic bomb. Lynch, employing cinematic techniques, transcends conventional iconography of nuclear explosions by visualising the unseeable processes occurring inside the explosion itself. However, these films raise the question of whether cinema’s excessive visual spectacle of nuclear annihilation ultimately leads to a paradoxical form of blindness to its reality.

Moose Island by Eglė Vertelkaitė as a Map Annihilating and Preserving National Identity

Agnė Narušytė — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

Moose Island, a project by Eglė Vertelkaitė, was presented at the Vilnius gallery Kairė–dešinė in the autumn of 2023. It is based on soviet-era maps of Lithuania used at work by the artist’s father, an engineer-hydrotechnologist. The artist scanned, photographed, and painted over these maps with black ink, attempting to erase imposed foreign place names and reveal the authentic ones. She also documented the process in film and photographed fragments of maps, thus exposing hidden “landscapes.” Another film, Glosos, was assembled from her father’s archive of family photographs. It was shown alongside images of crosswords that her father used to create and a land ownership document issued to the artist’s grandfather for his participation in the Lithuanian war of independence in 1919–2020. Together, these objects, photographs, archival documents, and maps form a narrative about the occupation of Lithuania and attempts to preserve national identity through the reiteration of the memory of places. The project consists of three parts: All of Lithuania. Absoluted; 44 Districts. Laid Out, and Negatives in Positives.

The use of transformed maps invites a critical reflection on philosophical models of opposing power that associate domination with space (or territory) and subjugation with time (or trajectory). In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that strategists occupy territory and inscribe utopian projections onto it without regard for local specificity, whereas tactics, without occupying space, move along trajectories that are even illegible to those who enact them. These tactical bodies, writing their vanishing and illegible texts while filling places with legends, memories, and dreams, oppose power that cannot be overthrown.

The article draws on the dialectics of territory and place, the language of strategists and tactics, and the memories preserved in photographs and myths in order to analyse Moose Island by Vertelkaitė as a model of resistance to totalitarian power. Through her interventions, the artist establishes a distance between a conventional map and an artwork as a multi-layered experience triggering historical imagination. She reveals the changed meaning of land as a territory occupied by the Soviet Union and the quiet language of lived and remembered places as a form of resistance. The real Moose Island, already present even in soviet maps, acquires a symbolic dimension related to myth and Baltic identity, signalling hope that even under occupation the restoration of national identity remained possible.

Home and the Security Dilemma. Shifting Representation of Home in Lithuanian Visual Arts of the 1990s

Tautvydas Petrauskas — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The article explores representations of home in Lithuanian visual arts of the 1990s, approaching home as a space that provides shelter and security against various types of threats—ideological or physical. It seeks to foreground safety and security— and its absence—as a defining imperative in artistic articulations of home during this period. In late Soviet era, prior to Lithuania’s Independence, artists frequently conceptualised home as a metaphorical shelter, a safe space for creative freedom and the exchange of ideas. The study therefore asks whether home remained—or became—a safe (or safer) space following the collapse of the Soviet regime and the disappearance of censorship as a source of threat. It further considers if the concept of home for artists in the 1990s retained its earlier connotations of security, and how any shifts influenced the representation of home in visual art. The article advances the hypothesis that in the late Soviet period, artists viewed homes as safe spaces that, to some extent, shielded them from ideology and censorship. In the 1990s, however, artists began to approach home from a domestic-material perspective, reflecting a need for individual security and a demythologised attention to everyday life. The study argues that homes constitute a distinct spatial phenomenon, forming a unique configuration of time and space. As Mary Douglas has suggested, while homes are directly related to space, they are not necessarily fixed; rather, they emerge through a relationship between physical space and subjective (existential) experience. In this sense, homes are spaces that draw the line between (in)security, allowing security itself to be understood as a phenomenon with a spatial dimension. The article first defines the concept of home, highlighting the connection between security and home-space, before addressing the notion of home(s) as a scarcity in the 1990s. It then analyses works by selected artists to examine how home was reflected in their practices. To emphasise that the issue of home concerned artists across various fields, the article focuses on works in painting (Eglė Ridikaitė), photography (Arturas Valiauga), and sculpture (Mindaugas Navakas). The analysis reveals that the dimension of security in the 1990s was based on openness to the Other, allowing home to be treated from an intersubjective perspective: Ridikaitė’s painting series Žiedų Street 50 suggests that home is not only a (safe) space inhabited by its owner but also a space to which, referencing Emmanuel Levinas, the Other can be invited. Security thus shifts from a condition of enclosure towards one of openness. Valiauga’s photographic series A Week Has Eight Days highlights how domestic space can preserve layers of past time, producing a form of heterochrony. Navakas’s sculptures Shelter 1 and Shelter T represent home as oriented toward the future, challenging the idea of a shelter as merely temporary. Taken together, these perspectives frame the Lithuanian 1990s as a contradictory period marked by insecurity, uncertainty, yet equally by openness and anticipation.

The Landfill Approaching the Sky

Ieva Butkutė — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

This article examines an anthropogenic industrial landscape as a material archive of collective memory, extraction, and the transformations of late socialism and early capitalism, focusing on the phosphogypsum landfill in Kėdainiai, located in the geographical centre of Lithuania. Existing for more than five decades, this white mound of waste is approached not merely as an environmental or industrial by-product, but as a socially constructed landscape that embodies historical, economic, and technological processes. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, the landscape is interpreted as a spatial structure through which memory is accumulated, preserved, and continuously reconfigured.

The analysis adopts a planetary perspective informed by Martin Arboleda’s concept of the planetary mine. This framework enables the conceptualisation of extraction, logistics, industrial production, and waste accumulation as interconnected components of a single global system, in which national borders dissolve and the Earth itself operates as an industrial organism. The article traces the trajectory of phosphates extracted in Morocco, processed into fertilisers in Lithuania, and ultimately deposited as industrial waste in Kėdainiai, thereby revealing the uneven geographical distribution of resources and waste within global production networks.

The growth of the phosphogypsum landfill is interpreted as a reverse form of mining, in which geological time is returned to the Earth’s surface through industrial waste. In this sense, waste appears as a residue of geological time. The text moves across multiple spatial and temporal scales—from an aerial, planetary perspective to the materiality of the Earth’s crust, and from socialist-era industrialisation to contemporary ecological and regulatory transformations marked by large-scale production and excessive consumption. Phosphorites are extracted in Morocco and fertilisers produced in Lithuania, yet supermarket labels declare: “avocados from Mexico, oranges from Spain.” Everything comes from everywhere; we inhabit a global logistical network. These shifts underscore how industrial landscapes persist beyond political systems, economic regimes, and scales of use.

Despite human attempts to regulate, contain, or commodify waste, the Earth continues to regenerate, and industrial wastelands gradually become integrated into emerging ecosystems. This transformation is framed as an ongoing planetary metamorphosis that challenges anthropocentric assumptions of control and permanence.

Conspiratorial Boeing

Adomas Žudys — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The crises surrounding the aviation giant Boeing—such as plane crashes and the mysterious deaths of whistleblowers—open epistemological fractures that unsettle trust in institutional media narratives. Conspiracy theories emerge as a means to reestablish meaning within an information crisis in which traditional journalism loses authority and audiences turn to alternative explanations online. The article analyses various media representations of Boeing that often rely on superficial, moralising, or ideologically charged interpretations of events. As traditional journalism struggles to sustain public trust and attention, audiences increasingly gravitate toward new media forms that offer more authentic, emotionally engaging, and participatory storytelling. These speculative narratives, although often dismissed as irrational, fulfil a cognitive and affective need for coherence in a fragmented world.

The Boeing phenomenon is examined through the philosophical lenses of Graham Harman’s theory of alluring objects, Bruno Latour’s concept of the black box, and James Bridle’s idea of the grey zone—each of which reveals how conspiracy thinking functions as both a symptom and a creative tool for engaging with the opaque entanglements of technology, power, and knowledge. Conspiracy theories are thus understood not only as delusions or misinformation but also as instruments of imagination that produce aesthetic and social resonance. The text further discusses artistic practices that employ conspiratorial narratives to critique institutionalised knowledge and propose alternative modes of witnessing and sense-making. Finally, Boeing engineer Kevin Westley and writer Thomas Pynchon are interpreted as poetic whistleblowers whose visual and literary works expose hidden relations between secrecy, technology, and media, prompting reflection on how meaning is constructed within the turbulence of contemporary information culture.