Our language betrays our bondage to "the visual"—we use terms like "insight" and "vision" as metaphors for knowledge itself. Cultural institutions casually designate museum artworks as "visual art," privileging seeing over other senses. Even our most sophisticated sciences translate invisible phenomena from the electromagnetic spectrum into spectacular renderings of nebulae and viruses, perpetuating our compulsion to make the invisible visible through quasi-photographic representations.

In Emilija Škarnulytė's film installation, Aldona, we encounter a day in the life of the artist's grandmother, Aldona. Since losing her vision in 1986, the year Chernobyl's radioactive poison scattered across Europe, Aldona has developed a different set of eyes—one that lives in her fingertips and flows across her limbs. Paradoxically, Škarnulytė presents us, the film's viewers, with an alternative to visual privilege by suggesting how Aldona uses alternative means of sensing beyond sight's dominion.

Watch as Aldona moves through Lithuania's Grūtas Park, an open-air tourist attraction populated by expropriated relics of Soviet power. Watch as Aldona's hands read the cold, fallen Soviet monuments like a priestess interpreting arcane runes. Watch as Aldona, who outlived her oppressors, finds solace in everyday rituals: washing cheese, organizing cutlery, and gathering apple peelings to compost and renew the cycle of life.

Like healers who diagnose by touch, Aldona guides us through latent legacies of power. Her confident, precise movements through contested space suggest that what we consider her "blindness" is also an enhancement in perception—perhaps recalling the myth of an ancient seer who peers through time, using extraordinary vision to divine warnings about the future.

Returning to the paradox of watching a film to reconsider the dominance of sight, Aldona also challenges its audience to read our surroundings through other sensory means. In previous installations, medicinal herbs from Aldona's village of Gerdašiai hang above the screen. These herbs were gathered in a place now caught between NATO forces and their adversaries, where surveillance cameras stand sentinel among native, healing plants. Replacing the digital eyes that sweep the borderlands today, Aldona scans the landscape through her hands and cultivates its produce, finding memory and inheritance in the stones and the soil.

Might we apply this perspective to other conflicted territories, such as the deserts and coasts of California, where residents often fail to see their homes as a "hot zone" in an ongoing story of colonization and climate destruction? Such an allusion seems purposefully encoded at Commonwealth and Council. In the gallery space, local plants that have survived the drought frame Škarnulytė's screen as wafting botanical scents fill the air visitors breathe into their bodies before encountering any images.

Although Aldona debuted over a decade ago, its influence resonates throughout Škarnulytė's body of work. Since Aldona, the artist has frequently employed extra-human devices—radio telescopes, sonar, and other remote sensing technologies—to make imperceptible natural phenomena accessible to human understanding.

And while Aldona might reinforce misconceptions on how one sense may compensate for another that is lost, the reality is more complex: the human brain's plasticity enables adaptation, but these adjustments only become meaningful through dedicated practice. Through Aldona and her subsequent artworks, Škarnulytė invites us to question our reliance on the visual, exploring how alternative modes of perception might reveal a hidden, more holistic "image" of our world—if only we take the time to pay attention, listen, and learn.

—Adam Kleinman

Working between documentary and speculative fiction, Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987, Vilnius, Lithuania)’s films and immersive installations take viewers through decommissioned nuclear power plants, deep-sea data storage units, forgotten underwater cities, and uncanny natural phenomena. Škarnulytė received an MA from University of Tromsø (2013) and a BA from Brera Academy, Milan (2010). Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Kunsthalle Trondheim (2024); Canal Projects, New York (2024); Centre Artistique et Culturel, Sion (2023); Tate Modern, London (2021); Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel (2021); National Gallery of Art, Vilnius (2021); and PinchukArtCentre, Kiev (2020). Selected group exhibitions have been held at The Brick, Los Angeles (2024); Palais de Tokyo (2024); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2024); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (2024); Villa Medici, Rome (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (2023); Helsinki Biennial (2023); 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); Bergen Kunsthall (2022); and Beijing Media Art Biennale (2021). Škarnulytė is a recipient of Ars Fennica Award (2023) and Future Generation Art Prize (2019). Škarnulytė has participated in residencies at Providenza, Corsica (2022); MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (2021); The Bogliasco Foundation (2021); Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (2019); and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta (2018).

Škarnulytė’s work is in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kadist Art Foundation; and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.