For Liste 2026, Drifts presents selected works by two Lithuanian artists, Beatričė Mockevičiūtė and Gerda Paliušytė. The artists are connected by a subtle and sensitive approach to corporeality, intimacy, light, and material. Through different methods, they explore diverse states of being in contemporaneity, bringing forward delicate questions of social reality. Their abstract works employ the viewer’s gaze as a primary instrument for grasping the ephemeral phenomena of contemporary society.

Beatričė Mockevičiūtė (b. 1994) is a Vilnius-based artist who holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2019). Recent exhibitions include Shallow Streets at Drifts (2025), Les Ambassadeurs at Fondation Fiminco (2024), and From Within at MO Museum. Her practice explores the optical qualities of light and ephemeral phenomena.

Blueish is a heat-curved glass work that captures the fleeting reflection from a car window. The piece highlights the transitory nature of urban surfaces, freezing ephemeral phenomena within the static space of an exhibition. This abstract image, seemingly self-contained, creates a sense of immediacy and resonates with quiet emotional states, such as the baby blues. The pervasive bluish tint functions as a subtle reflection on the digital age, in which LED light competes with daylight and increasingly permeates our sensory reality.

Gerda Paliušytė (b. 1987) is an artist based in Vilnius. She is interested in various documentary practices, historical and popular culture phenomena and characters, and their relationship to social reality. Her films, photographs, and installations often explore different forms of intimacy and collective existence. Gerda Paliušytė’s most recent solo exhibitions include shows at Jeu de Paume – Tours, CAC and Editorial in Vilnius.

Guys and Blue Flowers (2021 – ongoing)

Guys and Blue Flowers (since 2021) consists of two photographic series that are always shown as a unified work. Here we are confronted with the bodies of young men, abstracted as wandering forms and textures, implicated in and almost merging with their milieu, a series of alienating interiors. The subjects depicted in Guys, despite the name of the series, often reveal no clearly identifiable signs of gender, and they feel ephemeral, almost accidental. The male body is captured as an object for contemplation while the photographer’s eye challenges the legacies of patriarchy and conventional gender roles in Eastern European photography, from the Soviet era to the present day. The gloomy romanticism of Guys is redeployed in another series of works featuring macro images of roses and orchids injected with blue. The images in this series invite the viewer to look more closely, even though they do not fulfill the promise of greater definition suggested by the macro technique. The viewer’s desire for proximity, for resolution, is frustrated but kept alive in this manner.