Paulius Šliaupa. Exhibition "The watchful ground"

The Watchful Ground is Paulius Šliaupa’s fourteenth solo exhibition, which explores the intersection of technology, nature, and the human senses. The video works and paintings, created in Hanoi and Paris, are an attempt to experience nature as a structure extending through us.

According to Šliaupa, the works in The Watchful Ground allow us to consistently explore the same essential state – landscape as a living, active relationship rather than an image or background – through different media. “It was important for me to abandon the notion of landscape as a stable, ‘neutral’ category and to show it as a structure extending through the body, memory, technologies, and mechanisms of power,” the artist says of the upcoming exhibition.

P. Šliaupa lives and works in Belgium. He travels extensively and participates in international art residencies. His experiences and acquaintances are reflected in his work. After traveling through Vietnam in 2018, he decided to return to the Heritage Space residency, a MAP program that allows for a deeper understanding of the country through creative projects. He has visited Paris several times and was impressed by the Fondation Fiminco art residency. After joining, he spent a year creating a video installation entitled Faraday’s Refuge, which is about a reclusive inventor living in the forests of Dzūkija.

P. Šliaupa is interested in the state in which screens, sounds, and lights draw us in so deeply that a feeling of weightlessness arises when sound sinks into an echoing depth and, instead of illuminating, light swallows the motif.

In video works, the camera loses its distance and becomes a vulnerable, moving body. Rather than controlling direction, it becomes important to surrender to falling, uncertainty, and the drift between states. The drones’ descent into the Dzūkija landscape reveals an experience of fragility and raises questions about technology in the context of war and surveillance. The Red River in Hanoi becomes a temporary refuge where bodies, sounds, and daily rituals merge into a stream. In the paintings, the landscape matures slowly – time, light, sediment, and memory accumulate in layers. 

The Watchful Ground rejects the “big picture” and invites us to observe the landscape as an ideologically shaped, fragmentary, and constantly changing process in which observation means involvement.

P. Šliaupa (b. 1990) was born into a family of geologists and raised near the Merkys River. He developed a close connection with nature and a clear understanding that, although we are part of it, nature surpasses us. His work, especially his films, conveys a sense of the grandeur and everyday nature of the human experience in relation to nature. The artist started with painting and now creates video works and installations and writes art texts. He completed his Bachelor’s in Painting and Master’s in Sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, as well as a Master’s in Media Art at KASK and HISK. He also completed a post-academic residency program in Ghent, Belgium. He has participated in art residencies at the Fondation Fiminco in Paris; the M.A.P Heritage Space in Hanoi; the Centre Intermondes in La Rochelle, France; the SIM in Reykjavik; the ARE Holland in Enschede, the Netherlands; and the RAVI in Liège, Belgium. In 2022, Šliaupa won the ArtContest22 competition for young Belgian artists, the INPUT/OUTPUT 2023 Brugge Grand Prize, and the Simultan Technology Festival Prize in Romania in 2024.

On January 29, P. Šliaupa will also invite everyone to the Kaunas Picture Gallery for the opening of his exhibition, Krentant (Falling).

The exhibition is  financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
The Meno Niša Gallery in Vilnius is sponsored by the Vilnius City Municipality