Marija Griniuk

Until July 31, the exhibition "Intercultural Knowledge Exchange" by Marija Griniuk will be on view at the VDA gallery "Artifex".

The exhibition "Intercultural Knowledge Exchange" is the result of the artistic and scientific components of Marija Griniuk's postdoctoral fellowship at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2024–2026).

During her postdoctoral fellowship, Marija created the politically charged performance art festival "Performance Studies in Sápmi," which connects Sámi and international performance art. The festival was implemented in Karasjok in 2024 and in Bodø in 2026, in traditional Sámi land in Norway. The project results include the book "Intercultural Knowledge Exchange. Curating Lithuanian and Sámi Performance and Politically Charged Art" (published in 2026 by the Vilnius Academy of Arts Press), video documentation of Marija Griniuk's performances (created in 2024–2026), and paintings as a reflection of her life and work with the Sámi community. The project also presents painting on glass as a method of reflexive performance documentation, combining a historical, rarely used painting technique with contemporary tools and performative action.

For Marija Griniuk, this project provided an opportunity to live and create together with the Sámi community and to delve into her position as a Lithuanian working within the context of Sámi art and political art. The project also provided an opportunity to discover similarities between Sámi and Lithuanian visual language when working with themes of history, colonialism, and memory.

For Marija, artistic projects are inseparable from work with text and publications, as each art project is extended into phases of analysis and discussion, resulting in a publication. Performances, reflexive painting, and text became inseparable elements of her creative work during the project.

Marija Griniuk completed her doctoral studies in performance art at the University of Lapland in Finland. Her dissertation topic is a new methodology for documenting performance art based on the biometric data of the performance artist. M. Griniuk is a performance artist and researcher working as a department head at the "Nordlandsmuseet" museum.

From 2024 to 2026, M. Griniuk was a postdoctoral researcher at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Exhibition opening – July 14 at 6:00 PM.

Performance – On the last day of the exhibition (July 31) from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM, we invite you to see Marija Griniuk's participatory performance – "Map of Hospitality".