An upcoming exhibition at Tate St Ives will present the work of Lithuanian artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė. The exhibition will survey Škarnulytė’s practice, which merges documentary methods with speculative narratives to investigate deep time, invisible power structures, and the collision of mythology with technology.
Škarnulytė’s work is often approached from the perspective of a “future archaeologist,” sifting through the remnants of the Anthropocene. Her films and installations grant access to locations that are typically concealed from public view, such as Cold War military bases, decommissioned nuclear power plants, and deep-sea data storage units. These sites are framed as relics of a human culture whose technological advancements have produced a legacy of environmental damage and human loss. Within these explorations, the artist sometimes appears as a mythological hybrid—part siren, part chimera—navigating these charged spaces.
The exhibition will include works that connect the personal to the geopolitical. In the film Aldona (2013), Škarnulytė documents her grandmother, whose vision loss is attributed to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The film follows her as she interacts with a collection of discarded Soviet-era statues in Lithuania, tracing the contours of a contested past. This piece grounds the artist’s larger thematic concerns within an intimate, familial context.
Another featured work, Æqualia (2023), exemplifies her engagement with ecological critique and myth-making. The film, part of a recent trilogy, depicts the artist as a post-human entity swimming through the Amazon Basin. By filming at the confluence of the Rio Solimoes and the Rio Negro—a site of both natural wonder and industrial extraction—Škarnulytė addresses the destructive force of capital on the region’s ecology while invoking the interplay of myth, time, and reality.
A new 16mm film titled Telstar (2025), produced during an artist residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, will also be presented. For this piece, Škarnulytė surveyed a range of locations across Cornwall, from Neolithic standing stones and quoits to the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station. The film juxtaposes ancient history with the technological optimism of the space age, collapsing vast temporal spans within a single geographic area.
The installation at Tate St Ives will be configured as a series of large-scale, immersive environments. Architectural structures will be employed to offer varied perspectives on the films, complemented by glass sculptures and lightboxes. The exhibition is curated by Anne Barlow, Director of Tate St Ives, and Dara McElligott, Assistant Curator. It is scheduled to run from 6 December 2025 to 12 April 2026.
