Emilija Škarnulytė
Aug 30th – Sep 28th, 2024
Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Installation view | Emilija Škarnulytė, Æqualia, 2023
All images courtesy the artist; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf
Photography | Tino Kukulies, Düsseldorf
Videography | Studio Kukulies, Düsseldorf.
A darkened threshold transcends into a cinematic journey across displaced timescales as an immersive encounter with artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė coalesces the works Æqualia (2023) and Aphotic Zone (2022) in a unique cyclical dialogue. Forming an undulating odyssey through vortexing waters and cimmerian depths, time and space slows in a sensory-enveloping sympoietic vision, opening up what it means to be other, and more, than ourselves.
Engaged in a performative and lens-based practice, Škarnulytė creates at the intersection of liminal realms—between documentary and speculative fiction, the political and the poetic, sculpture and digital art, bodies and universes. Her interdisciplinary approach of artistic sense-making forms as submerged studies in world-making across stratified temporalities: employing careful orchestrations of space and scales, she expands and inverts filmic, perceptual and sonic dimensions alike. Human, more-than-human and camera bodies alike become future-archaeological tools to permeate the layers of deep time, articulating embodied aesthetic experiences and archaeological considerations of futurity. Her performativity of space and bodies—echoing the mutual implications of “knowing and being” conceived by feminist quantum physicist Karen Barad—deterritorializes and reminds that neither are truly as fixed as may be presumed.
In so much as we are water, we are already alien. But we are aliens in order to be of the Earth.
We are always in the process of negotiating our next adaptation, even if these possibilities are known only to our bodies.Curator Kate Sutton on Škarnulytė, 2024
A post-human chimera—the titular Æqualia—manifests as a sublime, counter-mythological guide in the swirling vortexes of the Encontro das Águas (Meeting of Waters) in Brazil. Part-mermaid, part-river-dolphin, their rhythmic journey through the confluence to the birth of the Amazon allures trans-corporeal articulations of being human that relinquish mastery in the flux and flow of our fluid worlds. Solimões’ milky white waters snake stubbornly with the heavy, black flow of the Rio Negro for six kilometres—a polychrome boundary visible from space. Within their bodies, timescales flow: one originating in glacial melt, the other dark with the young decay of lowland rainforests, warm and hypoxic. The panoramic, aerial gaze softly draws closer as the confluence’s thermo-sedimentary choreography transposes into the dance of dolphins manifesting around the artist-now-chimeric figure—whose own body becomes a scale with which to measure, tracing fractal dimensions as they build and accelerate to become one in a cosmological vision blurring the boundaries between myth and reality.
Rio Solimões and Rio Negro come together in fractal swirls along their meeting points: similar phenomena are found in diverse and dynamic environments, ranging from the Red Spot of Jupiter to fluctus cloud formations in the Earthly atmosphere.
The river basin is home to the pink Amazon River dolphins, locally known as botos and considered as an indicator of this crucial and vulnerable waterway’s health. Within a year of completing the filming of the work, the river suffered excessive droughts, resulting in a mass die-off of the already endangered species. Evoking an intimate sense of evolutionary kinship, the entangled performance of the artist and botos reattunes the transhistorical human agent—separate from the world that he has transformed—to the milieu of manifold planetary and interplanetary relationships that underpin the intricate networks of life on Earth—our inherent permeability to them, our mutual susceptibility to each other.
The ocean is sound—is transmission, is cosmic. Water is both real and quantum.
The richest world of sound on Earth is hidden in the polyphonic chorus of the oceans. The light of the waterworlds, sound illuminates the depths for those who reside here. It is also a further perceptual dimension Škarnulytė sculpts with: echolocations dissolve into reverberations of a distant civilisation in a soundscape of hypnotic, sinuous notes the deeper descent draws. Oceans have been a key site for anthropological exploits throughout the evolution of humankind, equally functioning culturally as a physical simulacrum of the human unconscious. The waters Škarnulytė presents are no longer a signifier of boundlessness, human alienation nor self-reflexive emptiness: rather, she reveals how fluid oceanic relations force us to think differently, and how, like everything else within reach, humankind have made full-use of the ocean as just another ‘standing-reserve’ for the prowess of techne. Transcended into a hyperobject in the Mortonian sense, she eloquently becomes-with water to contemplate the bewildering circular relationship between reality and representation, materiality and the subconscious, immanence and memory—iconic as much as echoic.
Crystallised amber encases hard drives and computer chips, relics of a present soon to be our future's past.
In this suspended state of awareness, minuscule free-floating Coccolithophores and crystallised amber—the sun stone long mythologised to be the hardened tears of Baltic undine-goddess Jūratė—come into focus: inhale, connect, exhale, reflect. Encased in unique calcium carbonate shells and designated the scientific name of Emiliania huxleyi, these specific coccolithophore are the most abundant of this crucial species: living adrift in the currents of the euphotic zone, they populate a majority of oceanic and freshwater ecosystems. Their unique primordial presence form the base of marine and freshwater food webs and they act as key players in the planetary carbon cycle, accounting for at least half of total oxygen production. They are increasingly studied due to their rapid response on a global scale to climate variations. In the words of curator Barbara Casavecchia in Dear Emilija: Three Letters across Remote Proximities (2023): Bodies, no matter how large or minuscule, have been accumulating in the lowest strata of the oceans forever. They are part of water, as much as water constitutes the majority of our bodies. Do we see this? Can we think across scales and with them?
Interactions between myriad matters reveal as light is lost to futures’ pasts—submersion deepens 4000 metres into Aphotic Zone (2022). Peering back from the future through perpetually dark waters, luminous sea jellies beam over choirs of fish, eerie alien architectures emerge from the ether and curious entanglements of human, machinic and more-than-human agencies materialise—shifting and scaling space as sonic ghosts of empires fallen sculpt the aural. In her seamless transitions between scientific documentary and advanced image-making technologies, Škarnulytė challenges traditional concepts of the former as simply a representation of indexical reality, articulating an allegorical framework of futurity that explores the limits of realism and contemplates the nature of (in)visible and speculative realities.
The peripatetic narrative of the installation’s dialogue between two works teleports us to the depths of the Costa Rican Pacific Seamounts as it submerges 4000 metres into Aphotic Zone (2022).
Looming in the eerie, ethereal depths, the ruins of the Duga radar—a Soviet-era missile defence system near Chernobyl, Ukraine—shift and scale space as the sonic memory of a distant civilisation sculpts the aural. Mixed by Oscar-winning sound engineers Jaime Baksht and Michelle Couttolenc, Aphotic Zone’s soundtrack is drawn from field recordings made in Mexico City’s Zócalo (main plaza) on the 500th anniversary of Spain’s conquest of Tenochtitlan. They belong to Skarnulyte’s sonic archives emanating from her long-term body of research into spaces where contemporary and historical political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds: from relics of the Cold War, deep-sea data storage units, nuclear waste burial sites, to scientific facilities like CERN. The former capital of the Aztec Empire becomes a sonic ghost reverberating ecological loss and colonial grief, as contemporary Mexican street sounds orient towards the phantom call performance of humanity vis-à-vis current social, political and ecological signals—warning us of what may yet come.
Aphotic Zone is a prime example of Škarnulytė’s examination of the essence of research-based artists’ films. She joined Dr Erik Cordes and further marine biologists from Philiadelphia’s Temple University in their endeavours to identify a super coral species that can thrive under the warming and acidification of the oceans as part of the shooting process.
Courtesy Dr Erik Cordes and the Schmidt Ocean Institute, Palo Alto.
The camera moves around fluidly, floating through landscapes and architectures that seem to belong to another world—time extends irregularly, becoming longer, slower. An ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) carefully samples deep sea corals with its robotic arms as myriad life forms and alien landscapes reveal in images of the undulating seafloor, generated from 3D laser data.
Like the hydrologic cycle itself, a continuous revolution of almost four billion years, there is no beginning nor end in the narritival ebbs and flows of Škarnulytė’s solo presentation at Sies + Höke—only eternal transformation. Subtle and shapeshifting, in its symbolic allure Škarnulytė’s immersive installation illuminates hidden human hubris and reframes narratives of human binaristic hyper-separation from the living world. Bodies, space, rivers and oceans at once become-with each other—manifesting a portal to allure new orientations for connection and sense-making outside the scales of our anthropocentric age.
Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987) is a Lithuanian-born nomadic artist and filmmaker. Working at the intersections of documentary and speculative fiction, her immersive audio-visual installations are aesthetic explorations in world-making across stratified temporalities.
Approaching the camera as a future-archaeological tool, Škarnulytė permeates the layers of deep time: from neutrino ghosts of the universe to decommissioned nuclear power plants, forgotten underwater cities and uncanny natural phenomena become subjects of submerged studies, guided by human and non-human entanglements. She articulates post-human counter-mythologies and archaeological considerations of futurity, seamlessly melding science and culture to probe realms ranging from the cosmic and geological to the ecological and political. The remnants of modernity, aphotic recesses of the Earth’s aqueous body as much as the human psyche tide the uncharted waters of Škarnulytė's interdisciplinary endeavours.
Winner of the Ars Fennica Award 2023 and the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulytė recently presented works at Gwangju Biennale, Henie Onstad Triennale, Vilnius Biennale, and Helsinki Biennale. Solo exhibitions include: Kunsthall Trondheim (2024); Kunsthaus Göttingen (2024); Ferme-Asile, Sion (2023); Tate Modern, London (2021); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (2021); Den Frie, Copenhagen (2021); National Gallery of Vilnius (2021); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2017); and Contemporary Art Centre CAC of Vilnius (2015). She represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano and participated in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale as well as the group exhibition Penumbra, organised by the Fondazione In Between Art Film on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale. Her films are found in the collections of IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou, and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art in New York, and numerous film festivals.
Upcoming exhibitions include the group shows OCEAN at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and Les Frontières sont des animaux nocturnes / Borders are Nocturnal Animals at Palais de Tokyo and Kadist, Paris, as well as the solo exhibition at Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, opening October 2025.
Emilija Škarnulytė, Aphotic Zone, 2022 [still]
Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film.
