Arts at CERN - Meet the Artists - Emilija Škarnulytė

by Emilija Škarnulytė, Giulia Bini (CERN, Moderator)

Thursday 17 Sept 2026, 17:00 → 18:00 Europe/Zurich

52/1-052 (CERN)

The event is aimed at the CERN community and CERN Alumni and Retirees, therefore physical attendance will require having a valid CERN access card. 

---

Arts at CERN Talk series - Meet the artists

Arts at CERN is delighted to invite you to the third edition of the Meet the Artists Talk Series, organised in collaboration with the CERN Library.

This event offers a unique opportunity to discover the work of artists visiting and residing at CERN,  inviting members of the CERN community to explore, question, and critically engage with the artists’ practices and projects, and the ways in which these are informed by CERN’s research and scientific community.

Emilija Škarnulytė is a Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker, recipient of Arts at CERN’s Collide Stockholm international residency award, in partnership with the Nobel Prize Museum. Škarnulytė will spend one month at CERN followed by one month at the Nobel Prize Museum to develop a new artwork with the support of the curatorial teams of both institutions.

At CERN, Škarnulytė will begin her project Memory of the Unseen. Her practice is rooted in the exploration of infrastructures that mediate between the visible and the invisible, the human and the post-human, the present and deep time. In dialogue with scientists at CERN, she will engage with event reconstruction, decay signatures, detector sensitivity and the temporal behaviour of experimental data, focusing on what she describes as “thresholds”. At the Nobel Prize Museum, she will investigate the institution as a site where narratives of scientific discovery enter the cultural sphere and collective memory, through research into archival materials, exhibition strategies and historical narratives.

The talk will be an opportunity to discover Škarnulytė’s project and to discuss with the CERN community some of the questions guiding her exploration of CERN’s scientific research, infrastructure and experiments. It will also be a chance to engage with the artist’s evocative and visionary practice, which blends 3D scans, speculative visual sequences and atmospheric sound to explore what she calls ‘fragile spaces where the invisible becomes briefly perceptible’.

We look forward to welcoming you to this opportunity to take part in an open dialogue and reflection at the crossroads of artistic research and scientific enquiry!

The discussion will be moderated by Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN.

A light apéro will be offered at the end of the talk.

Read more:

Arts at CERN and Nobel Prize Museum announce the Collide Stockholm international residency award recipient and two Honorary Mentions.

Collide Stockholm.

Emilija Škarnulytė: artist.

 

Artist biography: 

Emilija Škarnulytė is a Lithuanian-born artist and filmmaker. Her practice is rooted in the exploration of infrastructures that mediate between the visible and the invisible, the human and the post-human, the present and deep time. These include nuclear power plants undergoing decommissioning, deep-sea prototypes of data storage systems, neutrino observatories and geological formations shaped by technological intervention. The topics addressed range from the cosmic and geological to the ecological and political.

Recent solo shows include exhibitions at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Kunsthaus Graz, Tate St Ives, Kunsthall Trondheim, Canal Projects, Kunsthaus Göttingen and Kunsthaus Pasquart. Škarnulytė won the 2023 Ars Fennica Award and the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, awarded by the PinchukArtCentre. Her works are part of public and private collections such as Centre Pompidou, Kadist Foundation, Kiasma, Fondazione In Between Art and Film, Helsinki Art Museum, FRAC Corsica, Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA), and MO Museum.

Image credits:
Photo of Emilija Škarnulytė: Diana Luganski
Design: Daniela Salgueiro