Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė (*1987, Vilnius) creates art worlds that appear both ancient and futuristic. In her films and installations, she walks that fine line between documentation and imagination, between geological depths and cosmic distances. What interests her are the invisible structures that shape our existence - be it political systems, ecological contexts or the long, slow time of the earth itself. Her works invite us to look at the world with different eyes, beyond the human perspective.

At the center of her work are mythical figures that act as bridges between the past, present and future. The figure of Sirenomelia appears again and again - half human, half sea creature, a variation on the ancient mermaid. Embodied by the artist herself, she leads us into an intermediate world in which archaic myths and futuristic visions overlap. Female deities embodying natural forces and cosmic energies also populate her pictorial worlds. These figures point to alternative narratives beyond male-dominated historiography and open the view to other forms of knowledge and storytelling.

Emilija Škarnulytė, Hypoxia, 2023, video still © Emilija Škarnulytė

Her new solo exhibition in the dome-shaped Space01 at Kunsthaus Graz makes this aesthetic-mythological universe physically tangible. The immersive installation of large-format video projections, light and artifacts transforms the space into a kind of underground observatory in which time and scale become blurred. Visitors are immersed in landscapes that are simultaneously marked by human destruction and sustained by timeless beauty.
Škarnulytė's artistic practice points to the fragility of our planet, but she refrains from providing clear answers or instructive gestures. Instead, she opens up spaces of wonder - poetic, multi-layered, enigmatic. The images on display are as apocalyptic as they are hopeful: even in the remotest corners beyond human influence, the idea of life after destruction glows.
The exhibition thus becomes a meditation on the invisible and the overlooked, on myth and science, on what was and what might yet come. A space of experience that renegotiates the boundaries between man, nature and the cosmos - and at the same time makes it tangible that every future is created from the stories we dare to tell ourselves.
November 8, 2025 to February 15, 2026
www.museum-joanneum.at/kunsthaus-graz