The 17th contemporary art fair “ArtVilnius’26,” taking place at the Lithuanian Exhibition and Congress Center LITEXPO from October 1–4, has this year connected the art scenes of Vilnius, Warsaw, and Vienna. The fair will feature 70 galleries, an international Projects zone, the sculpture, installation, and performance exhibition “Path,” tours, educational activities, as well as a three-day discussion program “ArtVilnius Talks.”
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In an open call, the curator of the exhibition “Path,” A. Barysionakas, selected eleven participants – artists from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belgium, Belarus, and Ukraine. The works in “Path” will be presented by Žygimantas Julijus Bėrontas, Bob Bicknells-Knight, Kasparas Brazovskis, Anna Egle, Rokas Janušonis, Povilas Jatkevičius, Mariia Kulykivska, Anna Mari Liivrand, Katsiaryna Miats, Ūla Šukytė, and Vytautas Viržbickas.
The curator of “Path” states that he selected the works guided by intuition, valuing the interrelations between the works, and the balance of different experiences and perspectives.
The exhibition route, displayed in corridors, unexpected LITEXPO zones, and outdoors, will this year lead visitors through a forest with poisonous plants, ruins and sacred spaces, abandoned industrial areas, personal archives, and fragments of virtual worlds.
“The exhibition’s title ‘Path’ is quite broad, but I liked accepting it as such,” says the exhibition curator. “We are not organizing a research-based museum exhibition; it will be alive, emerging from the artists’ practice. I wanted to show how differently, yet uniquely and very concretely, one can come to terms with the world’s demise,” says curator A. Barysionakas.
A. Barysionakas has a long-standing connection with Lithuania. At the end of the last decade, he came to Vilnius to study at the European Humanities University. Here, he became interested in critical theory, contemporary art, and cinema, later continuing his studies in Stockholm and Vienna.
The curator worked in Belarus for a long time, but after the 2020 protests and regime repressions, like many active people in the country’s cultural field, he could no longer return home. Now he calls home the community of friends, colleagues, and like-minded people stretching from Vilnius through Warsaw to Berlin and other European cities.
The participants of “Path” were selected through an open call. According to the curator, when evaluating hundreds of applications, not only the ideas of the works but also their interrelations, geographical and gender balance, and the possibility to exhibit the works in LITEXPO’s indoor or outdoor spaces were important. However, intuition played the biggest role.
“I read the applications without a clear vision of what I was aiming for; I just looked at what could be installed and which works connected with each other. One must also keep in mind the technical conditions – some works’ materials are suitable for outdoor display, others must be installed indoors only. But essentially, it is a very intuitive process,” says A. Barysionakas, adding that he himself was surprised by how fragile, subtle, even gentle the exhibition turned out.
Viewers will see many everyday, industrial, infrastructural materials in the exhibition, but the curator says they speak of very deep, painful, dramatic matters dictated by nature and the landscape.
“The path we walk together with the artists is quite dark. We walk through ruins, thinking about how to survive dark times, and different objects and ideas help to navigate this path,” says A. Barysionakas.
The installation “Amid Bitter Flowers” by Estonian artist Anna Mari Liivrand invites viewers into a garden, ruins, and a cemetery. In the work, the artist combines new and ancient stained glass, construction glass fragments covered with graffiti, and iron. Poisonous plants growing in Estonia are engraved in the glass, becoming eternally blooming phantoms, and the installation speaks about the traces humans leave in the environment and the beauty that can grow from ruins.
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Latvian sculptor Anna Egle creates both small jewelry objects and monumental sculptures. At the exhibition, she will present three works – “Three times nine,” “Dark Flower,” and “O.” Steel, composite, metal, gold leaf, and natural forms become monumental.
The young generation artist Žygimantas Julijus Bėrontas’s sculpture “syzygy,” created especially for the 2026 fair, refers to the alignment of celestial bodies in a single line. The mixed-media work in “Path” will serve as a kind of landmark – a sign suggesting to look not only at the object in front but also at the invisible connections between individual exhibition works.
Katsiaryna Miats, born in Belarus and currently living and working in Vilnius, will present a continuing installation “I Think About Home A Lot.” It features photographs from the artist’s family archive transferred by cyanotype onto antidepressant packaging.
The small works displayed in a showcase appear fragile and very personal, but behind them lies the experience of many people forced to leave their country. Family memory merges with the attempt to establish oneself in a new reality, and the medicine packaging becomes not household waste but material for telling stories about trauma, longing, and homes that are not always possible to return to.
Kasparas Brazovskis, a Lithuanian-Norwegian artist currently living in Antwerp, used construction fences, steel, and 3D-printed ceramics in the installation “Against the Bulldozer Tactic.” Personal experience of displacement from his homeland and multicultural identity prompted the artist to turn the narrative into resistance. The infrastructure typical of a construction site or demolition area confronts fragile ceramic details in his work, and the physical barrier speaks about the right to place and memory.
Bob Bicknells-Knight, born in the United Kingdom and living in Tallinn, employs sculpture, painting, cinema, installations, and digital media in his work. The artist is interested in the mechanisms of video game worlds, power structures operating online, control, time, and decay. In his sculpture “Deposit,” digital world imagery will transfer into physical space: printed image and acrylic on canvas are combined with wood, concrete, 3D-printed details, and tealight candles.
Interdisciplinary artist Povilas Jatkevičius, who began his career in performing arts and later turned to contemporary sculpture, will present the object “Café Mirage.” The artist is interested in layers of spaces, histories that have occurred or may still occur there, coincidences, intuition, and signs.
Ūla Šukytė, an interdisciplinary artist living and working in the Zarasai district, arrives at the fair with a large-format installation “1534 Forms.” Exploring imagination and uncertainty, the artist blurs the boundaries between real and imagined, familiar and inexplicable, connecting separate elements into a structure growing according to unusual rules.
Sculptor Vytautas Viržbickas, participating in the fair for the first time, will analyze social mechanisms of the contemporary world – the power of information, geopolitics, consumerism, and individual loneliness – in his five-meter-high work “Joys.” The monumental scale of the work will also transform the LITEXPO space.
The 17th international contemporary art fair “ArtVilnius’26” will take place from October 1–4 at the Lithuanian Exhibition and Congress Center LITEXPO. The artists and their works in “Path” are presented in the official “ArtVilnius’26” catalog. The fair is organized by the Lithuanian Art Galleries Association public institution “ArtVilnius,” funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and supported by the Vilnius City Municipality. The fair’s patron is the law firm COBALT, and the general partner is “EIKA Group.”
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