Marija Griniuk, together with Vilnius Academy of Arts students Milda Paukštė and Greta Balčiūnaitė, and Sámi performance artist Marit Bringedal Anti, created the performance Postcards from the North. Its video documentation will be screened at the MO Museum cinema hall on May 10 at 17:00 (Pylimo St. 17, Vilnius). Marija Griniuk is the first Lithuanian performance art academic to defend a doctoral dissertation at the University of Lapland in Finland and is currently conducting postdoctoral research at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The project is supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (grant no. S-PD-24-49).
In her pedagogical practice, Marija Griniuk promotes collaboration and the creation of real-world work experiences for students during their studies. As a performance artist and educator, she believes it is crucial for students to gain international collaboration experience and make connections with potential partners and galleries while still studying. For this reason, the platform chosen for the creation and premiere of the performance was Supermarket 2025, the Stockholm Independent Art Fair (supermarketartfair.com) in Sweden, which annually gathers around fifty galleries from around the world. The MO Museum was selected as the platform for presenting the performance’s video documentation. It is important that students experience various forms of art presentation and acquire skills in art communication—an area as vital as creative practice itself.
Today, artists often work interdisciplinarily, where creative work, curatorship, and communication intertwine and become part of the everyday practice of an artist. Thus, acquiring these skills early in one’s career is essential.
Marija Griniuk always works in a cyclical manner—her collaborative art projects are often followed by academic articles or conference presentations. She also introduces this approach to young artists, encouraging them to engage in artistic dissemination not only through creative platforms but also through academic ones. The arts-based research (ABR) methodology, based on the work of Patricia Leavy (2015), defines art as a broad field containing various approaches such as arts-based inquiry, arts-informed research, aesthetic research practice, performative inquiry, scholartistry, and arts-based research in education and health.
According to MacDonald and Hunter (2018), arts-based research is a hybrid methodology that integrates artistic, narrative, and autoethnographic methods, allowing for the exploration of complex and often sensitive topics. In the case of the performance Postcards from the North, the project addressed themes of ecopolitics, inviting each participant to explore these themes from their unique perspectives. Greta Balčiūnaitė sensitively and poetically examined the topic of ecological violence through visual and vocal means, while Milda Paukštė focused on the issue of plastic excess within ecosystems.
The dissemination of this project follows three stages: the performance was first presented at the Supermarket Art Fair in Sweden, followed by the screening of the video documentation at the MO Museum on May 10, and the third stage will take place in August at the Carpa 9 conference at the Theatre Academy Helsinki in Finland.
Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. Guilford Publications;
MacDonald, A., Hunter, M. (2018). Arts-Based Research in Education: Becomings from a Doctoral Research Perspective. In: Kember, D., Corbett, M. (eds) Structuring the Thesis. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0511-5_25
