This paper examines “Out of Darkness”, an immersive exhibition by Jenny Kagan, which presents the story of her parents, who survived the Holocaust in Kaunas. Through a carefully curated interplay of historical narratives, personal artefacts, and scenographic installations, Kagan constructs a space where memory is not merely recalled but actively performed and reconstructed.
Cultural communication channels were open between Lithuanian diaspora communities in the Western world, particularly the United States of America (USA), and Soviet Lithuania during the Cold War. Cultural transfers took place from the West to the East. This is an intriguing yet understudied area of art history concerning Lithuanian migration and diaspora. The aim of this article is therefore to discuss the peculiarities of the transatlantic migration of Lithuanian diaspora artists and to investigate the processes of cultural transfer and their influence on Lithuanian art between 1960 and 2000. Based on Lithuanian archival sources and press reports, the research aims to discuss the peculiarities of the transatlantic migration of Lithuanian diaspora artists, and to investigate the processes of cultural transfer and their influence on Lithuanian art during this period. The study focuses on cultural relationships developed through the private initiatives of Lithuanian emigrants, which were controlled by heads of state museums at an institutional level. This meant that cultural transfers during the soviet period were controlled from the centre of the Soviet empire, and had a strong political element. This article is based on the concepts of cultural anthropology and intercultural communication. Cultural transfer is viewed as a method of mediation between different cultures, providing an opportunity for communication between artists in free and totalitarian regions. Cultural objects (works of art) and information were transferred to the target audience, i.e. cultural users in Soviet Lithuania, in the second half of the 20th century. Although it was a one-way process initially (with exchanges, visits and exhibitions beginning later), a real transfer of artwork in the form of exhibits, deposits and donations took place between 1960 and 1990. When communicating with Lithuanian artists in occupied Lithuania, US Lithuanians transferred a worldview and information about modernist art that influenced soviet ideology. In this way, the Lithuanian diaspora in the USA made a significant contribution to the dismantling of the socialist system from within. This study uses unpublished original archival material: correspondence between Lithuanian art institutions and Lithuanian diaspora communities in the USA.
This article analyses several artworks applied as cases within current research (addressed as cases later in the article) by artists Marija Griniuk (LT), Jiří Kovanda (CZ), Darja Lukjanenko (UA), Jan Pfeiffer (CZ), and the curator Lenka Sýkorová (CZ) within the theme of embodied drawing. This study builds on diverse backgrounds and education traditions within drawing as a medium in the art academy environments of Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic, and artists’ interpretations of this medium through the involvement of their bodies and sites in artwork creation by which the embodied drawing takes the shape of the intersection of drawing and performance, thereby shaping enstatic drawing. This study adopts an arts-based action research methodology in which each artwork is developed as a research cycle. Three research cycles are connected to individual artworks by the involved artists, and one research cycle surrounds their collaborative embodied drawing. The research problem outlines a collaborative approach to embodied drawing concerning the meeting of four diverse artists with different academic backgrounds from art academies, representing a broad range of approaches to drawing as an artistic expression. Through performative actions and discussions, the artists collaboratively create movement- and drawing-based interactions with nature and architecture.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to a halt. In order to ensure the health and safety of society, many facilities had to transfer their functionality to the digital sphere, or at least enhance their digital capabilities. Museums were no exception – the inability to allow visitors to gather in person at exhibitions meant that communication with the audience as well as educational activities had to develop through digital forms. Between spring and autumn of 2020, a study was carried out examining the external digital activities of major Lithuanian art museums during quarantine, and indicators of public interest in content published by museums on main channels such as websites and social networks. The aim of the research was to identify the main challenges faced by the large Lithuanian art museums in concentrating their activities in virtual spaces, and to determine the causes of these challenges. Based on the data collected through monitoring the virtual published content of Lithuanian major art museums, together with interviews with museum staff and external experts, the study’s conclusions of the study are presented at the end.
The research examines possible ways of preserving cultural heritage sites in the context of military conflict in the example of the escalating situation in Ukraine (from March 2014 to 2025), and provides recommendations for creating an infrastructure that will preserve cultural property for future generations in the event of war or natural disaster. The article analyses the experience of international cooperation on the preservation and digitisation of cultural heritage, and considers proposals for the new mechanism’s development of international cooperation to further improve measures to preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage through the implementation of state and public initiatives. In particular, as a result of the application of semiotic and axiological methods, attention is drawn to the special legal protection of its objects presented in regulatory documents (international protocols, provisions of conventions and laws of Ukraine). Since the protection of material objects of historical and cultural heritage in wartime is mostly impossible, an important task under martial law is to create an inventory of cultural objects to be digitised, and to develop specific projects for digitising cultural objects. As a result, there is an urgent need to update modern legal requirements and methods of digitisation, approaches to the implementation of state policy in the field of cultural heritage protection, and effective coordination between international organisations and national institutions working in the field of cultural heritage protection in the areas of armed conflict.
