Marija Šnipaitė’s personal exhibition “Dwelling” in Marcinkonys Station gallery

You reach the train station after almost two hours of rhythmic thumping. After previously being an intermediate stop on the way to Warsaw, now It’s the end of a route. From here you can move forward, strolling in the woods or giving a visit. If you brought your bike with you, you can pedal one hundred kilometers back to Vilnius. The station – a point in the trajectory of the train’s locomotion, a spot for a brief pause and shelter for those waiting. Though this time I had nowhere else to go. Maybe, I didn’t want to. The station was the final stop. This space was not associated with what it is or was once around it but with the route Vilnius – Marcinkonys, the hearsay of the conversations of the travelers, their backpacks, the color pink, and a ceiling with a fir tree pattern. The random short-term experiences, taking on forms and materials, lose their nomadic state of being and invite me to stay in this temporary location, where a returning train is seen through the window. All that’s left is to set up a tent for some time.

The artworks exhibited in the Marcinkonys Station Gallery refer to taking a halt and pausing during a trip.  The moment of standstill here is not only settling down in a designated location, it’s an undefined period of time, circumstances, and sense of feeling. Fragments and momentary observations of the trip’s routine are translated to spacial structures, where elements of the scenery are transformed into geometric shapes while abstract objects acquire a physical form, by the artist. The exhibition highlights associative thinking, referencing both personal and co-cultural experiences, her attention to materiality, time, and space, and sensibility conveyed through sculptural language, all that is common in Marija Šnipaitė‘s works. The artist is consistently testing out sculptural limits by combining various materials and found objects and reshaping the environment. Šnipaitė creates a contemplative, somewhat dreamlike atmosphere in the exhibition Dwelling, where the viewer is encouraged to stop and evaluate his role in the journey experienced in the present time by combining these elements.

Marija Šnipaitė (1988) is a young generation artist who graduated with a Master’s degree in sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Arts and Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design in Germany. In 2016 became a member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association. Since 2011, she has been participating in exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad, presenting sculptures in public spaces. In 2014 and 2019 she received an individual scholarship from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania for art and culture creators.

(Av17) Gallery, which organizes the exhibition, is located in Vilnius and is a space that has been actively working with contemporary art for eleven years. It is one of the few galleries operating in Lithuania, presenting the art of an exclusively contemporary object, sculpture, and installation. In addition to its continuous exhibition activities, the gallery implements various international and regional, artistic and educational projects, and carries out exchange programs with foreign and Lithuanian creators, thus promoting the dissemination of contemporary art in our country and Europe.

The project was partly supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.