Pukytė creates public space interventions, site-specific installations, conceptual projects, text-based performances and experimental poetry. Using various strategies of appropriation, recycling, chance, found artefacts, and unwitting participation, she deconstructs socio-ideological myths and socio-cultural clichés, explores collisions between loss, memory and history, tensions between uncertainty, perception and manipulation, between inertia and freedom of choice. She is interested in the ‘unimportant’, and in various glitches, such as mistake, misunderstanding, and failure, that speak of absurdity, humour and tragedy of human condition.
In 2017 Paulina Pukytė curated the 11th Kaunas Biennial titled There And Not There: (Im)Possibility Of A Monument, an international site-specific exhibition that explored monument as public space art, questioned traditional and populist practices of monument building (and removal), and encouraged new, contemporary, and relevant ideas and strategies of commemoration.
In 2024 Paulina Pukytė curated a site-specific public space exhibition in Klaipėda, Lithuania, titled Phenomenon M, that explored the city of Klaipėda and urban culture as text.
Residencies, Conferences, Symposiums, Workshops:
2020 Prisms of Silence. International Symposium as part of Communicating Difficult Pasts, Estonian Academy of Arts
2019 Sculpture Today 4: Anti-Monument: Non-Traditional Forms Of Commemoration. International Conference, Centre of Polish Sculpture, Oronsko
2019 On The Fluidity Of Humour And Absurdity. 9th Inter-Format Symposium, Nida Art Colony
2018 Liquid Memorial. Site-specific Workshop on Borders with Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz, Nida Art Colony
2018 Spaces x Memories. The Baltikan Workshop 2, with R-Lab of Stockholm Royal Institute of Art, Nida Art Colony
2014 Residency at Nida Art Colony
2010 Residency at the Baltic Centre for Writers, Visby, Gotland
2001 Residency at Boswil Artists House, Switzerland
1998 NIFCA Residency in Soumenlinna, Helsinki
Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2021 It Is In A Certan Sense A Nightmare. Atletika gallery, Vilnius
2019 Something Is. Titanic Exhibition Space, Vilnius
2014 Girls And Boys. Šlapelių Museum Gallery, Vilnius
2009 Artscape. Vartai Gallery, Vilnius
2006 A Girl With Pears. Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius
2001 Chewing-gum Competition. Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius
Selected group exhibitions:
2023 Good-bye East Good-bye Narcissus, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia
2022 Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds. National Gallery of Art, Vilnius
2020 Difficult Pasts. Connected Worlds. Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga
2019 Monument and Censorship. Vitrine&Bench artists-run space, Vilnius (artist-curator)
2018 Dead Honeys. Artists Residence Herzliya, Tel Aviv
2018 MAGMA. Instituto centrale per la grafica, Rome
2017 MAGMA. National Art Gallery, Vilnius
2017 There And Not There: (Im)possibility of a Monument. 11th Kaunas Biennial, Kaunas (artist-curator)
2012 Mediations, Lithuanian Art 2012: 18 Exhibitions, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
2012 Post-Idea. Titanic Exhibition Space, Vilnius
2011 Au hasard Balthasar. KKKC Exhibition Space, Klaipeda
2010 Lithuanian Art 2000-2010: Ten Years. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
2007 Vissions In The Nunnery. The Nunnery, London
2006 Schema. Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York
2005 Citylights. Site-specific project in bus stops in Krakow, Poland
2002 Parallel Progressions. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius
2002 Who Is Who. IBID Projects, Vilnius
2000 To Be Useful. Artists in a disused furniture factory, Vilnius
1999 Identification. Site-specific art project in city trolley-buses, Vilnius
1999 Flat’99. Site-specific exhibition in artists’ living spaces, Vilnius
Education:
2003-2005 MA, Royal College of Art, London
1984-1990 Vilnius Academy of Art