KCCC presents Recurse , an exhibition by internationally acclaimed artists Andrius Arutiunian and Saodat Ismailova. Exhibiting for the first time in Klaipėda, Arutiunian and Ismailova are kindred spirits whose artistic practices explore overlapping themes. The exhibition immerses visitors in the myths that shape their worlds: Eastern cosmologies, including Zoroastrianism; vernacular knowledges; alternate temporalities; esotericism; life in the presence of death; forces of nature; and the extractive transformation of the Earth.
Recurse deploys the circle as a motif and a cipher. As planetary life cycles accelerate, historical trajectories collapse onto each other, exposing the non-linear mechanics of cultural memory. Recurse presents moving image and sonic installations, each grasping at elements on the brink of disappearance. Ancient and fictional landscapes lie in ruins, transformed by the ideologies which created them. They allude to the uneven dispersal of life, baring how life can continue after the disappearance of the conditions that made it possible, and how death lingers quietly below the world of the living. The artists’ worlds, which merge contemporaneous life and belief systems with ancestral knowledges and ancient rituals, are realms of unfixed chronologies. In Ismailova’s film Melted Into the Sun, a voice tells us: “Each new cycle seems shorter than its predecessor. The eternal has become temporary, and the temporary has become our heritage.”
Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer working with hybrid forms of listening, vernfacular knowledges, and contemporary cosmologies. His research experiments with the perception of deep time, non-Western epistemologies, and alternate methods for world-ordering.
Saodat Ismailova is a filmmaker and artist from the first post-Soviet generation in Uzbekistan. Weaving memories, myths, rituals, and dreams into the tapestry of everyday life, her films explore Central Asia’s historically rich and multi-layered culture, at the crossroads of different realities, migrations and colonial legacies.
Lua Vollaard is a curator and writer based in Amsterdam. Her curatorial practice engages with the broad intersection of technology and ideology, disclosing how the materiality of technologies mediate an understanding of the world.
Press release from KCCC
Image: Andrius Arutiunian. Black Banquet. 2026. Image courtesy of the artist
