• Paulina Pukyte
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• Lietuviškai

The source of light that creates the “shadows”, cast by the interior elements of the building, is not visible – it seems to fester somewhere inside the walls. During the last decade of the Soviet occupation (1980‒1990), the National Gallery of Art building housed the Museum of the Soviet Socialist Revolution. Perhaps it is the infamous dawn of a new tomorrow that never broke – the Soviet promise of the better future that never came? Or maybe it’s not a dawn but a burning explosion that collapsed white columns into piles of black ash?
According to sociologist Avery Gordon, the lost is only seemingly absent because the forced “disappearance” of aspects of the social continues to shadow all that remains – the past always haunts the present.
Visitors to the exhibition unwittingly interact with these “shadows” – unintentionally stepping on them, changing their shape, blurring their outline, carrying them around the gallery space with their feet and gradually dissolving them into the present.

Shadows
2022 Site-specific intervention, National Gallery of Art in Vilnius
2023 Site-specific intervention, Museum of Contemporary Art of Estonia
Black sand on the art gallery floor