The Druzhba project (2003-ongoing) is part of the exhibition “Borders are nocturnal animals / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai”, curated by Neringa Bumblienė and Émilie Villez and presented at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius in 2025.
Rooted in the geopolitical turmoil caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, the exhibition explores the colonial histories of Lithuania and the region beyond, weaving connections into a broader international narrative. It is the second iteration of an exhibition presented simultaneously at KADIST Paris and the Palais de Tokyo in autumn 2024, in the framework of the Season of Lithuania in France.
The Druzhba project explores the cultural, political, and geographical territories that unfold in a fictional journey along the world’s longest crude oil pipeline, stretching 4,000 kilometers from Siberia, through Ukraine and Belarus to the Baltic States, Poland, Germany and other European countries. Druzhba, or “friendship” in Russian, is a master signifier, a grand-narrating, imperial structure meant at its inception in 1960 to “lead the world into a new dawn”. The project’s psycho-geographic readings grapples with mechanisms of power and submission that rightfully belong to the past but still persist even today.
Druzhba, 2003-ongoing. Installation. High-performance plastic, UV print, Film archival footage transfer to video (Division of Image and Sound Documents at the Lithuanian Central State Archive).
Architecture in collaboration with Jurga Daubaraitė and Jonas Žukauskas (2016). Graphic design in collaboration with Gaile Pranckūnaitė and Marek Voida (2018)
Thanks to Akademie Schloss Solitude, Jean-Baptiste Joly, Ivan Doložinsky, Lithuanian Film Centre, Živilė Mičiulytė, Oleksiy Radynski, Péter Zilahy
Photo: Eglė Marija Želvytė
