Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter's exhibition "Metric No. 5"

The exhibition "Metrika Nr. 5" by artist duo Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter has opened at the Rupert art centre. The axis of the exhibition is a newly created work, which takes place in the storage facilities of the National Library of Lithuania, usually hidden from visitors' eyes.

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter, who participated in the Rupert residency program exactly three years ago, return to the new exhibition spaces of the Rupert art centre to present a video installation prepared entirely anew with local and international creators. The solo exhibition presented in Vilnius is a series of documented performances directed by the artist duo, in which they attempt to grasp the infrastructures of thought, history, and memory.

Working with video, installation, and performance, Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter (Amsterdam) explore the connections between industrial processes, professional languages, and the human body. Interested in contemporary infrastructures, algorithms, and administrative power, the artists translate various operations – legal, logistical, architectural – into the field of performance, and then examine the limits of what the resulting systems can and cannot absorb. In the artists' video works and objects, human-made environments, bureaucratic procedures, and psychic life intersect. The creative process begins with a simple premise and is developed by uncovering the mythological layers hidden in everyday life. In this way, the artists create temporary spaces where resonances of collective experience, memory, and tension are revealed.

"It is interesting to observe how, from the very beginning of this project by Marissa and David, it has become increasingly relevant. Since 2023, when the artists created the first artificial intelligence agent based on a part of the Lithuanian Metrica documents, this technology has permeated and become a priority issue in many fields. However, even more important than the technology itself is how the artists use it to raise open questions about memory, the writing of history, and the distinction between fact and fiction," says exhibition curator Viktorija Šiaulytė.

The works feature images of the storage facilities of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania.

In the work filmed in 2025, three psychotherapists who have entered the storage facilities of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania appear. Surrounded by shelves of documents, the women, who find themselves at the very center of the performance, listen, ask, and react, while the archive reveals its desires and fears. Critical questions of selfhood, consciousness, and collective experience form and dissipate, and the sessions reflect psychotherapy procedures as they might be applied to a subject whose "mind" is composed of vast, undying human writings.