Curator Name: Eglė Ambrasaitė
Dates: June 2025
Hometown: Vilnius, Lithuania
Lives & Works: Žeimiai Manor House (Aikas Žado Laboratory), Žeimiai, Lithuania and Berlin, Germany
URL: https://egleambrasaite.com | Instagram: @egleambrasaite
Education:
PhD Candidate in Comparative Gender Studies, Central European University, Vienna
Masters in Political Sciences, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania
Bachelor of Arts in Film, Video and Interactive Arts, Middlesex University, London
Bio/Statement:
Eglė Ambrasaitė is located in a spot reserved for interdisciplinary art: she is an independent curator, interdisciplinary artist, and a researcher, based in Berlin and Žeimiai. She is the director of “Aikas Žado Association” and the curator of Aikas Žado Laboratory, a collectively-run, non-profit interdisciplinary art institution based in Žeimiai Manor House, Lithuania. Based on crip materiality methodologies, Aikas Žado Laboratory is a contemporary art device, constructed in Žeimiai Manor House. Aikas Žado Laboratory is organized as an individually collaborative artwork by the artists Domas Noreika and Eglė Ambrasaitė, as well as a communal artwork. The main activities of the Laboratory are practical experiments related to the management of cultural heritage objects and the combination of discoveries, methods, techniques and knowledge in the fields of contemporary art, science and culture. The main principles of the Laboratory’s activities are illustrated by the application of conservation, prevention and restoration systems in the Žeimiai Manor House. At the Laboratory, the team collects and tests historical materials, organizes scientific research and exhibitions, and presents cognitive expeditions that showcase specific solutions and methods of turning the Manor House into a contemporary artwork itself.
Eglė Ambrasaitė is an awardee of the Young Artist Scholarship from the Lithuanian Council for Culture in 2018, 2020 and 2021, and the Mobility Stipend for Art and Culture Creators from the Lithuanian Council for Culture in 2023 and 2024. In 2020, she was granted the Permanent Artist/Creator Status from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania. She has exhibited her works in Lithuania (Aikas Žado Laboratory), London (Red Gallery), and Berlin (District Gallery). At the moment, her main artistic and curatorial practices circulate around the themes of (crip) materialities, bodies/embodiments, love and healing. Her theoretic interests encapsulate gender, affect theories, critical disability studies and dark ecology.
Her solo and group exhibitions include: “MURMURS & ROARS” (2024) group exhibition, UAR Studios, Brooklyn, New York City, USA; “Venusian HC” (2024) performance, Aikas Žado Laboratory (AŽL), Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Exuviation Fervor” (2024) group exhibition, AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Elektra” (2024) solo exhibition, VU Observatory of Ideas, Vilnius, Lithuania; “(Hope)stalgic materialities and wishful horizons” (2024) group exhibition, Residency Unlimited’s (RU) House on Governors Island, NYC, USA; “Angsty Places” (2023) solo exhibition and performance; “Sideworks: Manor House” (2023), AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Mimeses” (2022), group exhibition, AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Enchanted Landscapes” (2020), group exhibition, AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Nothing to Regret” (2019), group exhibition, AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Decay(-ing)” (2019), solo exhibition, AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania; “Bio-fantômas’ic sessions” (2018), group exhibition, AŽL, Žeimiai, Lithuania.
Ambrasaitė also presents her creative work in various conferences, which include public lectures “Aikas Žado Laboratory: Crip Materialities” for Uncool Artist (UA), Residency Unlimited (RU), New York City, USA (2024 and 2023) and Sapieha Palace Symposium, Vilnius, Lithuania (2025); public lecture “Gender apparatuses of Soviet socialist biopolitics in late socialist and early post-socialist town of Žeimiai: the rationale and practices of both regulation and (women’s) resistances” for European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) and Women in Tech (Paris, France, 2024); public lecture “Curators Talk Ecology“, part of the programme “No cutting corners”, together with “Contemporary Art Center” in Vilnius director and curator Valentinas Klimašauskas and “Rupert’s” director Viktorija Šiaulytė, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania (2024); “After After: NYU Cinema Studies Conference”, New York City, USA (2023); “Moving Away from ‘Post-socialism’: Reconceptualizing Scholarly Approaches to Contemporary Eastern Europe and Eurasia through Feminist and Queer Theory Lenses”, Budapest, Hungary (2022); “15th Annual Feminist Theory Workshop (FTW)”, Duke University, Durham, USA (2022). She also offers workshops, including tutoring for Rupert’s Alternative Educational Programme (AEP) in Lithuania (2021 till 2024) and creating “Critical Matter and Matters of Critique: Experimental Writing Through Feminist and Post-human Participatory Art Approach” workshop in SCS Centar-Jadro, Skopje, North Macedonia and Aikas Žado Laboratory, Lithuania (2022 and 2023).
Click here to read her recent text “Disruptive Love(s): Exploring Togetherness in Aikas Žado Laboratory’s and Eglės Ambrasaitė’s Theoretical, Practical and Artistic thoughts”, published in Rupert Journal, vol. 2, 2022.
