COURTESY NIDA ART COLONY
Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė will represent Lithuania in the upcoming 2019 Venice Biennale with an opera/performance piece titled Sun & Sea. The work takes place on an ad-hoc beach where the performers sing as they sunbathe, with the audience watching from above. “Sun & Sea’s setting is a makeshift beach area, set up indoors to resemble as closely as possible a real-life, crowded beach: like a counter-monumental, anti-baroque theatre,” the artists said in a statement.
Sun & Sea has been performed at Vilnius’s National Gallery of Arts in 2017 and as a “micro-opera” at Palermo Gallery in Stuttgart. The curator of the Venice Biennale version is Lucia Pietroiusti, the public programs curator of the Serpentine Galleries in London; the work’s two commissioners are Rasa Antanavičiūtė, the executive director of Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, and Jean-Baptiste Joly, the founder and artistic director of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
Update 7/3/18, 12:15 p.m.: This post has been updated to reflect changes made since the news was first announced.