A woman born with sirenomelia, a mythological posthuman being takes us on the journey to the Cold War submarine base above the arctic circle. She exposes a future liberated from the military and economic structures that oppress the present, a future in which relations between humans and nonhumans have been transfigured, a future in which the cosmic dimension of an earthly coexistence is interlaced within the texture of the social. Sirenomelia explores questions of the beginning of the universe in relation to the geological ungrounding processes, invisible structures, geo-traumas and deep time. It is a fictional visual meditation about contemporary science and a cross sections of the larger systems of power and the politics of desire. By performing in Sirenomelia herself, Škarnulytė becomes a measure for biosphere, magnetic fields, photons, minerals and gravity waves.

Sirenomelia

Energy Island invites viewers for an immersive sensorial trip into the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, now undergoing a decommissioning process. The images of contaminated ruins transform in the fire, light and shadow; the destruction of the industrial space consistently reveals how Cold War energy structures impact recent geopolitical processes and leave planetary threats over long periods of time. The project takes a geological approach – it reads things that compose this flat landscape as a stack of stratigraphic layers. The man­made space is understood as a sedimentary process and the infrastructures, as well as the mineral resources, are assessed as the key parameters defining a development of the project.

Energy Island

New Mineral Collective is the largest and least productive mining company in the world. The company provides counter- prospecting operations and geo-trauma healing therapies at 259 Lake Shore Blvd E and Small Arms. This video installation, Pleasure Prospects, follows the process of acquiring prospecting licenses for alternative values and takes a critical look at “perforated landscapes”—land altered by extractive industries.

Pleasure Prospects

'See the soft pink, white and blue pools of the Dead Sea in Your Body Is A Mine (2019), its shimmering expanses of salt flats and pink cliffs, its pale shores littered with salt factories, commercial spas for tourists, political trauma and apartheid, a geo-political space of weightlessness and weighted politics, of extraction and violence and wellness. The light in the film is overpowering—it trembles. No bodies but industrial bodies in sight. “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live,” Audre Lorde writes, famously, so lit. But what if there is no light, in some interior, and what product?' (Quinn Latimer)

Your Body is a Mine

'The film drops us into the druggy deserts of the American West Coast—Joshua Tree National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Utah salt flats—and then moves to spa therapies and desert suburbs of unofficial, “squatted” mining plots, in a kind of collective hallucination.' (Quinn Latimer)

Neon Oasis

The aphotic zone is the deep and dark region encompassing most oceanic waters, into which light hardly penetrates. The Lithuanian artist and filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė has made a hypnotic film, somewhere between documentary and imaginary account, in which the oddness of the underwater world is confronted with the sonic landscape of a distant civilisation.

Aphotic Zone

With striking images and meticulous sound work, Burial reminds us of the paradoxical relationship between scientific development and the destruction of nature. Questioning the effects of human activity on the planet we inhabit and which we have put at risk, the film focuses on the unsolved issues of nuclear plants and nuclear activity.

Burial

The title of the work derives from the term ‘aphotic zone’, also known as the ‘dark ocean’ – the depths of the ocean that are inaccessible to sunlight. In the summer of 2022, Škarnulytė premiered a video work by the same title for an exhibition in Venice. The one-off performance Aphotia at LNOBT personifies the term, combining aspects of nature, deity, human and animal, and providing a metaphorical seedbed for promiscuous forms of being to flourish. The theme at the heart of the performance – invisible worlds (depths of water and of (sub)consciousness) – continues the artist’s enduring field of interest while closely overlapping with the Biennial’s central topic of the city, seen from the perspective of a speculative future, in the face of climate change and rising water levels.