Cosmologies and deep time collide in Andrius Arutiunian and Saodat Ismailova exhibition

KLAIPĖDA.- KCCC Exhibition Hall, Klaipėda, presents Recurse, an overview of recent works by Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian and Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova.

Between two mirrors, you find a recursion of your point of view: an image repeated inside itself. Recurse stages such a doubling. Arutiunian and Ismailova, artistic kindred spirits who have connected on a shared imaginary space since 2022, are brought into direct conversation across common terrain: Eastern cosmologies such as Zoroastrianism, vernacular knowledges, alternate temporalities, esotericism, life in the presence of death, forces of nature, and the extractive transformation of the Earth. Visitors move through the myths that shape both artists’ worlds, where ancient rituals, buried resources, and dreams of utopia return in different guises to press on the present.

At the core of the exhibition sits a monumental screening of Ismailova’s film To the Throat of the Sun (2026), which takes the contested legacy of al-Muqanna, the enigmatic eighth-century figure known as “The Veiled One,” to juxtapose dreams of utopia with the environmentally destructive legacies of the Soviet Union. Light is both revelation and annihilation: the phrase “I will take you to the throat of the sun” suggests enlightenment alongside total destruction. The exhibition, Ismailova’s first in Lithuania, also includes 18,000 Worlds (2023), a work on which the artists collaborated directly; Arutiunian, trained as a composer, designed its sound.

Arutiunian’s recent work borrows rites, myths, and underworld iconographies to project a version of limbo marked by avant-garde rituals. The Black Banquet (2026) acts as a welcoming space for spirits, its installation engulfed in bitumen, a remnant of deep time in the form of viscous petroleum. Motifs of coins, funerary vessels, and tomb walls drawn from underworld cosmologies were fed into a custom algorithm to produce a new iconography for the speculative deities of a world to come. The exhibition also includes Seven Common Ways of Disappearing, first presented in the Armenia Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022).

Recurse deploys the circle as motif and cipher. As planetary life cycles accelerate, historical trajectories collapse onto each other, exposing the non-linear mechanics of cultural memory. Figures on the fringes of religious societies reappear, cast through a contemporary lens. Across installations circles emerge in divination practices, natural elements, stellar interfaces, and shifting seasons, and materialize as carriers of information, such as vinyl records, oil drill cores, and sundials. Time runs askew: the artists’ worlds merge contemporaneous life and belief systems with ancestral knowledges and ancient rituals, creating realms of unfixed chronologies.

Curated by Lua Vollaard / Architecture by Jonas Žukauskas / Coordinated by Gabija Savickaitė, Žana Jegorova / Funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Klaipėda City Municipality.

Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer working with hybrid forms of listening, vernacular knowledges, and contemporary cosmologies. His research explores the perception of deep time, non-western epistemologies, and alternate methods of world-ordering. His work has been shown at Performa ‘25 and the 14th Shanghai, 15th Gwangju, and 17th Lyon biennials, as well as at Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, CAC Vilnius, and Moderna Museet. It is held in the KADIST and Centre Pompidou collections.

Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist from the first post-Soviet generation in Uzbekistan. Weaving memories, myths, rituals, and dreams into everyday life, her films explore Central Asia’s multi-layered culture at the crossroads of different realities, migrations, and colonial legacies. Her work is held in collections including Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Pinault Collection, and has been shown at Eye Filmmuseum (solo, 2023), the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and Documenta fifteen (2022).

Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Her practice engages the intersection of technology and ideology, examining how the materiality of technologies mediates our understanding of the world.

Klaipėda Culture Communication Center is one of the largest contemporary art spaces in Western Lithuania, dedicated to making contemporary art accessible and experiential.