Dainius Liškevičius

Dainius Liškevičius belongs to the generation of artists that started their career when Lithuania became independent again in 1990. He works in an interdisciplinary field encompassing installation, photography, performance, and objects, consistently rethinking the principles of form and its function. The artist creates situations in which different artistic languages intersect, and familiar images take on unexpected, often ironic forms. His work is characterized by a critical relationship with ideologies, institutions, and the mechanisms of visual culture. Analyzing the specifics of a particular place, Liškevičius explores patterns of human behavior, transformations of identity, the relationship between the sacred and the profane, and the constant tension between narratives of personal and collective experience.

In his solo exhibition “The One in Motion” Dainius Liškevičius continues his ongoing investigation into historical memory, institutional space, and structures of power, this time focusing on the overlap between the sacred and the secular in contemporary culture. Rather than affirming this intersection, the exhibition frames it as a constantly shifting condition, directly dependent on the viewer’s gaze, spatial positioning, and trajectory of movement. Elements of church interiors, relocated into the gallery space, lose their original liturgical function yet retain a powerful symbolic charge, operating as markers of memory and authority.

The artist employs wooden church balustrades and columns as a conceptual axis that structures the visitor’s experience and delineates the fragile boundary between transcendence and everyday life. Within the exhibition, these objects are transformed into kinetic structures, moving in different directions and generating tension between linear forward motion, oriented toward infinity, and cyclical return. In this way, the paradox of the illusion of progress comes into focus – each step forward simultaneously contains the possibility of returning to the beginning. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider whether technologically mediated movement leads toward transcendence, or merely returns us to a cycle in which the boundary between sacredness and the everyday becomes increasingly difficult to define.

Dainius Liškevičius (b. 1970) graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts with a degree in sculpture in 1996 and in 2012 obtained a degree of Licentiate of Arts. He has been a member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Union since 1998. The author has held over 30 solo exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad and participates in group exhibitions around the world. In 2015, he represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale with his project “Museum”, and in 2021, he won the Lithuanian National Culture and Arts Prize. In 2023, he presented the premiere of his documentary film “Modern Apartament” at the European film forum SCANORAMA. The artist’s works have been acquired by Lithuanian museums and private collections.

The exhibition “The One in Motion” will be open until April 16th at (AV17) Gallery.

The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.