Concept

With the 15th Kaunas Biennial, Life After Life, I sought to bring together artists, artistic practices and a curatorial approach that either reflect or work through the conditions and moods of transition and uncertainty, in ways that remain unresolved or unstable themselves. This edition centres on temporal and emotional states that recur, stall or resist closure: a moment that feels like an endless present looping back on itself, or an after end-of-history interlude. What, if anything, is shifting remains arguably unclear.

In Life After Life, I think of biennial-making as an adaptable form, at times strained, overwhelmed or out of step. I wanted to provide audiences with an exhibition that shifts in scale, tempo and tone, treating tensions and dissonances as method. The exhibition unfolds against a backdrop of algorithmic decision-making, fractured trust and attention, faltering “rules-based order” and contemporary art’s increasingly antiquated role as a democratising product. I hope Life After Life moves between the structural and affective registers, tracing how conditions like anticipation, control, shame and inertia take on aesthetic form.

The Baltic context, embodied here by Kaunas, informs the exhibition’s underlying structure. In this region, shaped by overlapping modernities and suspended transitions, episodes such as the interwar period and the years of economic shock therapy echo faintly yet pervasively—unresolved, stuttering, inert, triumphant.

I am interested in how artists, audiences and I myself navigate uncertainty as both subject and condition. I wonder how malleable the biennial structure can be, and whether it could reorganise the entrenched dynamics of contemporary art’s social and aesthetic fluency, even as it remains under pressure to uphold its own ossified format. I wanted to include fandoms of a broader range of artistic practices and genres, whether conventionally categorised as “contemporary art” or not, asking: if the globalised biennial format has reached an impasse with reality, what shape could the contradictions of the present take, once they are no longer wished away?

Alongside newly commissioned and recent works that record historical pressure, emotional latency and formal slippage, the exhibition incorporates smaller-scale projects that shift tonal registers and points of entry. Crossovers between contemporary art and other cultural formations—fan cultures, an art workers’ union, art-as-folklore-as-art—point toward and, I hope, amplify the contradictions at stake.

My sense of Life After Life continues to be organised by a question that has guided me throughout this process: what kinds of forms can hold the weight of uncertainty under conditions of social and historical upheaval, and what slips through them?

Curator of the 15th Kaunas Biennial, Adomas Narkevičius