Concept

Under the framework of Life After Life, the exhibition will directly engage with our present time. The aim is to imaginatively address the noticeable shifts in the international order and established notions surrounding contemporary art, while fundamentally serving as a space of possibility for the invited artists and their creative visions.

Life After Life approaches biennial-making as an adaptable form, if at times strained and overwhelmed. It works through shifts in scale, tempo, and tone, negotiating their friction as method. The exhibition unfolds against a backdrop of algorithmic decision-making, fractured trust and attention, the so-called ‘rules-based order’, and contemporary art’s role as a ‘democratising export’. The exhibition moves between structural and affective registers, tracing how conditions like anticipation, control, shame, or inertia take on aesthetic form. Informing Life After Life, the Baltic context, embodied by Kaunas, is one of overlapping modernities and suspended transitions. Episodes such as the interwar period and the economic shock-therapy years echo as unresolved, stuttering, or inert.

Life After Life explores uncertainty as subject and condition, experimenting with the biennial as a malleable structure, capable of reorganising the established dynamics of contemporary art’s social and aesthetic fluency. Embracing fandoms of diverse artistic practices and genres—whether conventionally categorised as “contemporary art” or not—it asks: if the globalised biennial format has reached an impasse with reality, what shape might the contradictions of the present take when they are no longer wished away?

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

Life After Life asks what kinds of forms hold the weight of uncertainty under conditions of social and historical fracture, and systemic exhaustion, and what slips through them?