What Happens to the Exhibition as a Possibility for Dialogue when We Can’t Agree on the Reality We’re Living In? A conversation with Adomas Narkevičius

The contemporary art world does not exist in a vacuum: it is permeated by the same power dynamics, economic realities, and political tensions as the rest of the world. This is the premise for our conversation with this year’s Kaunas Biennial curator Adomas Narkevičius, who invites us to view the field of biennials not as a utopia detached from reality but as a systemic structure often replicating the same mechanisms of inequality. According to Adomas, art institutions today find themselves at an existential crossroads, between the need to remain sensitive to a complicated world and the logic of survival in an algorithmic attention economy. In this context, Kaunas appears as a paradoxical city: influenced by global capital structures, yet also bearing a strong history of alternative culture and political activism. Although Adomas is not connected to the city biographically, but rather through friendships and trust-based collaboration, it is precisely this kind of relationship that allows him to shape the biennial as an open, living conversation, between different experiences and ideas, and between the city’s past and its present.

We invite you to read our conversation with Adomas on doubt as a value, the exhibition as a space for dialogue, and how contemporary art can help us live with uncertainty, not by avoiding it, but by seeking forms that help us be in it together.

Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė: Hello, Adomas. As you know, this interview is about the upcoming Kaunas Biennial, which you are curating this year. I will definitely ask you about the biennial as a format, and the curatorial strategies that will soon unfold this September in the city where I grew up. Still, I’d like to begin with a personal reflection on a biennial experience that has stayed with me, specifically the 2011 Istanbul Biennial entitled ‘Untitled’. It was curated by Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa. The latter, notably, was also the curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, which sparked a great deal of discussion.

Back in 2011, I remember stumbling on the Istanbul Biennial almost by chance. It was part of a field trip with students from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Fourteen years have passed, and I still recall vividly the unpleasant sensation of being a tourist. Wherever the biennial events were held, there wasn’t a single local person present, except at the opening reception, which was packed with Istanbul’s elite. I didn’t turn down the champagne either. What stayed with me was a profound sense of alienation; it felt like none of the city’s residents even knew the biennial was happening. Because I live in Kaunas, my impression of the Kaunas Biennial is, of course, somewhat different. But tell me, do you think it’s possible to organise a biennial in a way that avoids this kind of exclusion?

Adomas Narkevičius: Hi Agnė, thank you for this conversation. Your personal, uncomfortably vivid memory from Istanbul is symptomatic of the art world at large. Perhaps it’s symptomatic precisely because the art world, its symbolic, financial and social economies, is not detached from the rest of the world, its everyday processes, transactions and dominant power structures. Like many readers of this niche interview for art professionals and enthusiasts, I sense that the declarative statements often made by biennial curators, at various levels and on various scales, have become something of a textbook ABC of biennial culture. Yet they often fail to align with the very principles that shape biennials, or with the rules of egalitarian democracy and the reality we actually live in. The oligarchs of digital capitalism have, over the past ten to fifteen years, altered both how we perceive the world and how we inhabit it together.

I would argue that the social contract that existed in the so-called West until recently, based on the belief that the state guarantees education, healthcare and culture, and a promise of social equality in exchange for citizens’ loyalty and participation in a democratic system, has been gradually eroding over the past decade. Major European economies have struggled to cope with large-scale crises, while cutting investment in public infrastructure and services, education, healthcare, and of course, culture. For instance, it’s long been known that the UK’s National Health Service is dysfunctional. But a decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine Germany’s famously precise rail system falling apart. Trump 2.0 and his personal alliance with the world’s richest man seem to me like a symptom and extension of these crises in the form of a newly imposed world order.

Meanwhile, the institutional art world in Western Europe has, during this same period, continued to behave as if the neoliberal globalisation package, complete with the ideals of equality and democracy, remains exportable to ‘developing economies’. Biennials, of course, are a major catalyst in this cultural globalisation machine.

At the same time, the foundations of Europe’s postwar art institution model have been eroded from below. Institutions based on the welfare-state model (open structures that for decades supported socially accessible and free artistic expression) have been hollowed out from within: squeezed by a lack of operational funding, ‘democratised’ through an influx of private money, and increasingly influenced by private interests (collectors, patrons, blue-chip galleries) in their programming and governance.

The part of the art world that has long been unbothered by unrestrained financial speculation and value bubbles has swiftly and diligently adapted to this new techno-feudal phase of capitalism, a phase that no longer requires a social-democratic face or the horizon of economic and social equality. Western Europe’s institutional art field has certainly responded, attempting to form a centre-left counterbalance, often incorporating activist art, educational programmes, grassroots community engagement, or directly politically engaged initiatives, into their programming. The political boundaries of this kind of inclusion became particularly visible in Ruangrupa’s curated ‘Documenta’ [Documenta 15].

I believe that many reflective institutional directors, and institutions themselves, feel stuck. Expression based on experiment and individual artistic freedom, once the cornerstone of the postwar Western art, now risks appearing irresponsible, or out of touch with reality. Yet politicising institutions is equally risky. For example, when political winds shift toward nativist right-wing agendas, essential cultural institutions and programmes are often restructured accordingly, as happened in Hungary and, more recently, in Poland.

Still, to me, the greatest, and perhaps existential, threat to contemporary art (by which I don’t mean art made today but the historically conditioned institutional ecosystem we’ve known in Lithuania since the 1990s) is this: in an economy of algorithmically amplified and curated information and attention, art institutions are no longer public spaces in the same sense they were before the platformisation of the internet. These are no longer spaces where all segments of society actively engage, and where attention is captured deeply enough to foster genuine social dialogue. In other words, the social polylogue is now happening elsewhere. But where exactly? There’s no definitive answer; but it seems to be happening more and more in privatised, sanitised digital spaces. Theorists and artists who emerged with post-internet art began analysing this over a decade ago, but their voices have since blended into the spectacle-oriented, techno-positivist art that now fuels financial speculation.

To put it differently, art institutions, and biennials based on the welfare-state model (such as the Kaunas Biennial), are now confronted with the question: Are they still capable of being social spaces for dialogue and respectful conflict? Are they still capable of engaging people with ambiguous, complex emotions, forms and ideas, ones that attempt to remain sensitive to a complicated world, even as the digital spaces we’re embedded in constantly try to sell us the illusion that the world is simple and one-sided?

The current situation in the Baltic States, and in Kaunas in particular, within the broader European landscape, is quite unique. While Lithuania has one of the highest levels of social inequality in the EU by key indicators, its economy has grown rapidly and is catching up with West European living standards. In the UK, the majority of people under forty, and anyone without inherited wealth, are facing social stagnation and a declining standard of living. Meanwhile (with important caveats), in Lithuania’s major cities, I still observe a belief in social mobility and the promise of equality: in other words, a belief in the future. Paradoxically, Lithuania seems to move towards values it believes in more strongly than the ‘West’, where those values are now under threat from populist right-wing forces. These conflicting moods coexist with very real anxieties related to Russia’s soft and hard power threats, which in turn bring an increasingly conservative public sphere and a declining threshold for mutual respect and attentive listening. It’s a highly complex emotional and social terrain. Capturing it in the form of an exhibition may be impossible; but I find that striving for this, even if it leads to failure, is more meaningful right now than curating a show based on the kind of confident premises about the world that dominated biennials back in the ‘end of history’ 1990s.

Anti-elitist attitudes towards the art world are often conflated with anti-intellectualism. But visiting exhibitions and geeking out about how an etching is printed, its historical significance, or how the art historian Rosalind Krauss connected emerging post-structuralist theory with Marcel Broodthaers’ conceptual games, that in itself is not elitism. Leftist pedagogy, as I imagine it, and as I sorely missed in my own high school art education, should encourage curiosity, inquisitiveness, and a comfort with not knowing. Artworks, more often than not, don’t know: they play, ask questions, and provoke doubt. Anti-elitist rhetoric, to me, seems rather reckless, and it’s already being co-opted by authoritarian populists. In the best version of the contemporary art field, it can be radically plural: ranging from formal experiments to ephemeral works that exist only in instructions or the imagination, to case studies that haven’t yet been tackled by other disciplines (e.g. history, archaeology, ecology), or politically activist art. These modes can coexist. The fear of not understanding an ‘intellectual’ exhibition or a work of contemporary art, which I myself often experienced while studying philosophy at Vilnius University, is often really a fear of being judged, for example, as uneducated. That fear can block the joy of noticing how light falls on paper, a surreal image, or an unexpected insight into a phenomenon I hadn’t seen before. This is closely tied to inherited psycho-social patterns typical of wounded post-colonial states: perfectionism, self-deprecation, distrust in oneself and others, imposter syndrome, learned helplessness, and so on.

AB: That was a very compelling and precise analysis of the roots of exclusion in the contemporary art field. Let’s continue with politics and history, this time focused on a specific city.

It won’t surprise anyone if I call Kaunas a conservative city. Although the Conservative Party hasn’t been in power in the municipality for some time, I would still say that the current city policies are even more right-leaning than they were under the Conservatives. Biennials are always confronted with the challenge of local contextualisation. It’s hard to truly get to know a city and absorb it in two years. On the other hand, perhaps not everything needs to be overly localised. I’d personally like to see Kaunas not just in the context of Lithuania. It seems to me that a biennial could be one way to expand or deconstruct Kaunas’ identity. How familiar are you with this city? How interesting is it to you within the context of the biennial?

AN: I can relate closely to your idea of expanding Kaunas’ identity. In a recent conversation, the artist Jasper Marsalis, who’s participating in the biennial, told me about his fascination with the moment when the ideas of Fluxus, civil rights, rock music, and free jazz all moved through the same streets of New York. I replied: ‘Did you know Jurgis Mačiūnas was from Kaunas?’ So the first thing you’ll see here will be the Fluxus Airport, and during the biennial’s opening weekend (13 September), the Fluxus Festival will also take place. As my proximity to Kaunas is based on friendship and mutual trust rather than biography, I see my role as contributing to a living, artistic conversation, and helping build connection between international artists, those who, in my view, reflect on, shape or challenge the spirit of our times, and those working here in Lithuania, particularly Kaunas. These are people who build culture and an alternative to the city government’s vision through their work and everyday lives. I hope that’s a sensitive and realistic way for a single exhibition (which, it’s worth noting, operates on a project-based model rather than an institutional model) to contribute to a city’s self-reflection, both in terms of its present and its past.

I see the exhibition’s relationship with the city through conversations and friendships with people who consider themselves residents of Kaunas. That’s why, in the context of KB15, I want to work with the Kaunas Artists’ House and the Lithuanian Art Workers’ Union. Even while working at Rupert, I was struck by how Kaunas was (and I believe still is) the leftwing cultural and intellectual epicentre of Lithuania. It’s also a place of activist movement, a site of political protest demanding equal rights for all citizens, social and legal equality, and respect for human rights.

Friends who participated in the first Kaunas Pride march described it as a historically significant event that changed how they saw and felt about themselves. I truly admire the people behind such events, those who are not always visible or audible in the public sphere but are incredibly persistent. So thank you, Viktorija, Edvinas, and so many others, volunteers, staff, and activists from the Emma social centre, Kaunas Artists’ House, and Luna6.

On one hand, I’d even say that it’s not hard to activate Kaunas as a city. It has a high-level international contemporary art biennial, and the variety of methodologies and themes developed by its guest curators over the years reflects the broader aesthetic and political codes of global biennial culture. Its residents participate in the global content economy of reels, memes, influencers and micro-celebrities, like those of other cities. They live both within global trends and within atomised digital bubbles.

As you hinted, the city’s government is by no means an outlier: it successfully localised the techno-feudal oligarchic model we discussed earlier. In Kaunas, it manifests through construction and infrastructure renovation, where the formula of ‘efficient manager + technocratic solutionism’ combined with the image of a successful businessman seems to work. The rule of the relatively pro-russian mayor in the interwar capital is a paradox worth a study of its own. But again, from talking with residents of Kaunas, I understand this administration didn’t appear out of nowhere. It grew out of years of ‘traditional parties’ mismanagement, unresolved critical issues, and complacency.

At the same time, I want to be honest, first and foremost with myself. It’s no secret that Kaunas is not my hometown. It’s not the city where I came of age as a person or as a cultural worker. I currently work full-time in London, and I’ve been honest with the Kaunas Biennial team from the start that I wouldn’t be able to deliver a locally grounded, research-based biennial. What I do bring with me is six years of experience accumulated in London, and a perspective on contemporary art shaped there,after a formative period at Rupert. Curators from ‘Eastern’ Europe are quite visible on London’s art scene today. You might even hear the occasional joke about an ‘East London East European art mafia’. I find great inspiration in what people like Milda Batakytė are doing at Auto Italia, what the Estonians Niina Ulfsak and Mischa Lustin are building through their project space Galerina, the curatorial practice of Tosia Leniarska, or my conversations with the Goldsmiths PhD candidate Vaida Stepanovaitė and UCL’s Daša Anosova. The direct or indirect contributions of these and other people will resonate in ‘Life After Life’.

Although our methods and interests differ, what unites them in my view is a refusal to conform to a narrow ‘Eastern European’ identity. They challenge the entrenched postcolonial discourses in the cultural sphere, which still fail to grasp our region’s post-imperial experience and the deep roots of Russia’s current military ambitions. I believe that, for international art professionals who have a sense of my work and values, and who plan to attend the biennial, this context will facilitate a more equal dialogue with the city and with the biennial itself.

AB: I feel compelled to add that when the first, and so far only, Pride march outside Vilnius was held in Kaunas in 2021, thousands of people showed up. The crowds far outnumbered the protestors who were against Pride. That event seemed to prove that Kaunas is not just a city of so-called marozai [a Lithuanian slang term implying conservative, macho-minded men]. And yet the institutional and cultural reluctance to keep talking about that moment, to remember it in any meaningful way, only reflects the face of Kaunas city politics. On the other hand, there are many other essential elements that make up the city and its culture.

In the press release for the Kaunas Biennial, I read: ‘“Life After Life” will open its doors to various art phenomena and genres, regardless of whether they are typically considered contemporary art. The anniversary festival will pose a central question: if the global biennial format no longer reflects the needs of today’s reality, what artistic form can respond to the contradictions of the present without trying to “fix” or escape it?’

That paragraph alone contains quite a few key statements, one of them being about forms of contemporary art. Based on my own work experience in the cultural field here in Kaunas, and probably echoing the thoughts of many of my colleagues, I’d say that Kaunas doesn’t particularly like what we’d call ‘pure’ contemporary art. It still occupies the position of a foreign body here, even in a class sense. Maybe it’s due to my limited knowledge, but I don’t personally know a wealthy Kaunas resident who collects contemporary art. We don’t have a dedicated contemporary art institution in Kaunas either, but we do have festivals that might be seen as functioning like institutions, periodically bringing in and showcasing international contemporary artworks. One of these institutions is the Kaunas Biennial. Beyond its obvious function and role, what other elements are important to you in the context of this event?

AN: I agree with your observation, it feels like it reflects the current reality. At the same time, I think that sometimes quickly moving politically significant subjects into the cultural sphere, especially when elected public representatives fail to implement concrete political and legal changes, can also have counterproductive effects. That said, I was glad to hear about the recent Constitutional Court ruling that enables same-sex partnerships. This is, of course, the result of many years of political and social work carried out by the LGBTQ+ community itself. But in a democratic society, such efforts shouldn’t fall solely on the shoulders of marginalised groups. The very idea of democracy relies on institutional responsibility to guarantee rights, not just on letting people fight for them, and on social solidarity.

In this regard, I keep coming back to the words ‘sensitivity’ and ‘understanding’, which stem from the same Latin root aesthesis as aesthetics. When successful, the experience of art can heighten sensitivity: that is, it can produce conditions for attunement to one another, to ourselves, and to the world. This kind of sensitivity, sometimes pre-verbal, can lay the groundwork for political action and responsibility: for how we speak, how we choose to treat each other.

Many of the large-scale biennial projects over the past decade have declared some kind of responsibility. But once you run their internal processes through the gears of ambition and institutional policy frameworks, you often end up in a zone of anesthesia (and I think we’ve all experienced at least one massive contemporary art show that left us feeling emptier afterwards than before). It’s hard for a biennial to break free from its 19th-century origins: its mission to exhibit the world, to present it in full, thereby producing the illusion that it can be understood, and thus mastered. This desire to control, sanitise and even solve the world still lingers in the biennial model of contemporary art.

AB: Another question, stemming from the same paragraph in the press release: what does it really mean to not run away from the needs of contemporary reality? If we go back to the themes of the 2022 and 2024 Venice Biennales, or other major exhibitions, like those at the Whitney Museum or the last ‘Documenta’, it’s clear that all of them were politically engaged in some way. They focused on the perspectives of marginalised communities, of local people; they addressed issues of identity, especially queer and BIPOC identities and histories. You could even say they claimed the potential to change reality. In fact, many on the political right are afraid that reality has already changed too much. As Trump would say, we’re living in dangerous, woke times. Personally, I feel that contemporary art is finally looking in the direction it needs to. Finally, it’s not just elite art connoisseurs who get to speak. Finally, the Western world is at least symbolically offering reparations: giving something back to those who need it most. What I’m most afraid of now is the backlash in the West’s contemporary art world, which is already under way. The art critic Dean Kissick’s essay ‘The Painted Protest’ is one example. So we all probably understand that art alone isn’t going to fix the world, and that this ambition is mostly symbolic. How do you view this tendency within today’s art field?

AN: I see the dynamics you mentioned playing out in the art world in slightly different light than just the left-right political backlash ping-pong, although in our neighbouring Poland that was probably the most tangible way the political shift translated into the cultural field. What concerns me is this: what is the endgame of such political wars for art institutions? I’m glad that political forces closer to my values and convictions have recently won in Poland, and I’m glad Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art opened with a vision rooted in those values. But what happens if this narrowly won coalition government fails to convince a broader segment of the public? It’s not hard, though I’d rather not imagine it, to envision a Trump-style authoritarian ‘revenge tour’: firing all allegedly disloyal staff, dismantling all socially engaged or progressive programmes.

What I’m trying to say is that we are living in a time of intensifying distrust towards democracy, its values and institutions. What happens to an art institution that is meant to facilitate open public dialogue when the public itself is no longer talking, when large parts of society no longer believe in the institution’s purpose or necessity? What troubles me most, and what most contemporary art institutions still avoid addressing, is one of the most uncomfortable and under-articulated questions of our time: can institutions and formats that were shaped during the era of globalisation and the so-called ‘end of history’ still convince anyone that contemporary art serves the public good? Can they still fulfil that mission?

If the answer is no, then art becomes just another information tool in the vast arsenal of political and oligarchic forces, merging with precisely what it often seeks to critique or distance itself from. As a curator, I very much care about confronting this tectonic shift. What happens to the exhibition as a possibility for dialogue when we can’t even agree on the reality we’re living in?

Today, with society fragmented by algorithms and both intellectual and emotional life ‘optimised’ by market logic, it’s hard to be guided by unoptimised curiosity. It’s hard to stay present with ideas I don’t agree with. And even the ones I do agree with are easier to support ‘quickly’, as Claire Bishop notes in her recent book Disordered Attention, often while doing something else at the same time.

In such conditions, ‘Life After Life’, as a format of contemporary art institutions, could be not a continuation driven by inertia, but a living attempt to imagine the afterlife of contemporary art. This does not mean an abstract or escapist ‘other world’, but a very specific question about the future after the present, after forms that no longer justify themselves, inevitably from within those very forms; after regimes of knowledge that have lost public trust; after a contemporary art system that struggles to embody the notion of the common good. It could still become a space where new rules of the game can be renegotiated.

As Lithuania leapt into market capitalism, for decades leftist political thought and activist practices were taboo, from family dinner conversations to national politics. This normalised legal, social and economic discrimination against minorities, and even as Lithuania’s economy and overall standard of living grew astronomically, so did economic inequality. This was reflected across public life: in the media, in academic publications, in research, in the artistic and cultural production supported by major institutions, and in national politics. Now, finally, there are tangible shifts happening: in public attitudes, in the subjects being explored in the cultural field, even in legislation (!). At the same time, there are forces that would like to undo even the smallest progress, weaponising the fear of a world that has changed ‘too much’.

Still, I don’t believe the field of contemporary art is just a neutral arena where political subjects, audible or inaudible, speak. Since the postwar period, this field has grappled with the fundamental question of how visibility is constructed: what gets seen, through which forms, in what language, and with whose permission.

That’s why I’m somewhat critical of reducing contemporary art to a vehicle for political messaging, as if its value were only measured by the position it takes. An artwork can act through form, materiality, structure, rhythm, silence; through elements that don’t necessarily yield to quick decoding or immediate clarity. In fact, it’s often through these formal aspects that a work can create a kind of sensitivity, cutting through language or, as psychoanalysts might put it, operating at the level of symbolic reality, resisting knee-jerk scepticism or pre-formed opinions. That sense of flight may be the first step towards an ethical or political response.

Maybe that’s why so many artists I’ve spoken with over the past five or six years are turning to practices of opacity, refusing to explain everything, to be easily translated into information. Today, when nearly everything visible must be hyper-legible, easily shareable, and instantly grasped, opacity becomes a form of refusal. It defends complexity, contradiction and ambivalence, the right to remain unreadable, unclassified.

To me, this isn’t apolitical. It’s a way of resisting the pressure to be instantly consumable, to be useful, to have a ready answer. It’s about protecting a space where something might emerge that the ‘smarter than you or I ChatGPT couldn’t yet regurgitate. Dense, hesitant, slow, or contradictory thinking: all of that, to me, is political.

AB: I’d like to ask about the title ‘Life After Life’, and the biennial’s theme, which is described as transformation and indeterminacy. I vividly remember my father on Saturday mornings opening up the thick weekend edition of Lietuvos Rytas, which covered all the week’s news, every aspect of life. That image represented a kind of stability: Dad at the breakfast table, occasionally sharing something he read about the world. There was no confusion or panic at that moment. It felt like a ritual, one that no longer exists. A transformation has occurred. I’m curious: how many layers of this idea of transformation will be present in the Kaunas Biennial? How expansive will this ‘indeterminacy’ be?

AN: That’s a beautiful image: your dad with Lietuvos rytas at the breakfast table as a ritual of stability. I think that contrast between the stable, nearly self-evident rhythms of the past and the discontinuities of the present is very close to what I’ve been thinking about while working on ‘Life After Life’. Would I be wrong to say that I’ve noticed, especially on Lithuanian social media, that Trump’s sudden isolationist turn struck like a collective shock, forcing people to re-evaluate certain assumptions about the US and its political direction?

I’m not interested in celebrating ‘transformation’ or ‘ambiguity’ as themes in themselves, concepts under which you could squeeze in just about anything. I’m more curious about what happens when inherited forms no longer function as they once did, when they still stand, but feel hollowed out, disconnected from the present. That’s not necessarily liberating. It’s more of a tension: between what we feel and what could be coming, but hasn’t yet taken shape.

In that sense, I don’t think ‘Life After Life’ will offer ‘vagueness’ as salvation, or ‘transformation’ as a solution. What I wanted was to bring together artists and artworks that work dialectically, where one idea (or expression, or image) doesn’t overpower another, but instead coexists with it, in friction. I’m interested in what happens when an artwork contains contradiction as its internal structure: formally, temporally and emotionally.

I hope the exhibition will allow these dimensions of indeterminacy to come together, to take shape as a coherent set of forms. I’m curious to see what an exhibition might look like if it could exhibit doubt: not in a way that dissolves into fog or noise, but in a way that could help us live more attentively together, even when answers are uncertain and the questions remain unresolved.

AB: Thank you, Adomas, for such a rich and thought-provoking conversation.