Emilija Škarnulytė (born 1987 in Vilnius) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Existing between the fictive and the documentary, "she works primarily with deep time, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political." Biography Škarnulytė holds a BA in sculpture from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, Italy, and an MA from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. She has exhibited at QSO Lens, CAC Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, in 2015; Extended Phenotypes, Viafarini, Milan, in 2016; Mirror Matter, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in 2017; and Manifold, Podium, Oslo, in 2017. Her films have been screened at the 15th International Venice Architecture Biennale (2016), SIART Bolivia International Art Biennial (2016), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands, 2015), 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014), Whitechapel Gallery (UK, 2015), Ballroom Marfa (USA, 2015), Pompidou Film Festival Hors Pistes (France, 2014) and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany, 2013) among others. Škarnulytė was a 2016 artist-in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. She is also the founder and co-director of the Polar Film Lab (with Sarah Schipschack) and a member with Tanya Busse of the artist duo, New Mineral Collective. Work In discussing her work with Nadim Samman of Vdrome in December 2018, Škarnulytė said "In my films from the last ten years, I have mostly researched places where contemporary political issues are staged between human and non-human worlds, the shifting boundaries between ecological and cosmic forces. I want to feel out all kinds of non-human and post-human scales in the depths of space and time." Throughout her works, Škarnulytė is often concerned with the "phenomena of neoliberal capitalism so massively distributed across ecosystems that they redefine the traditional notions of thing/place". While playful – perhaps no more so than when she turns herself into a mermaid, or “woman-torpedo”, to swim into a decommissioned NATO submarine base in "Sirenomelia" – Škarnulytė's short films interrogate the role of people to their new landscapes and questions of what happens in the coming strata, after those roles have served their intended purposes. These issues are not always at the scale of geologic, but are also more personal and poetic. In her work "Aldona" from 2015, In the spring of 1986, the artist's grandmother, Aldona, lost her vision and became permanently blind. The nerves in her eyes were poisoned. Her doctors claimed that it was probably due to Chernobyl's Nuclear Power Plant explosion. In the film we follow Aldona