

The Lithuanian Pavilion Without Walls is co-organized by Performa, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, and Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in New York, with generous support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, among others. It is also generously supported by Lithuania Foundation. Together, the partners will commission and present new works by contemporary Lithuanian artists Lina Lapelytė and Pakui Hardware, as well as Performa Projects by Raimundas Malašauskas, Robert Narkus, and Augustas Serapinas.
Initiated in 2013, the Pavilion Without Walls program reflects Performa’s commitment to presenting the social, political, and artistic landscapes of different countries through live performance. Over the last decade, this curatorial platform has brought voices from Australia, Estonia, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, Finland, and Taiwan to New York audiences. Each Pavilion is developed over a two-year research period in close collaboration with cultural institutions, curators, artists, and educators from the featured country to create a dynamic and deeply contextual program.

A walk traces a trail between two sets of rooftops and two temporalities: Christian Jankowski’s Roof Walk (2007) and Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece (1971). Between them unfolds a corridor of invisible architectures — air, scent, vibration, original and fake labels — the air thick with molecular interference. Inspired by Chandler Burr’s writing on New York’s scents, the walk drifts through olfactory holograms: steamed rice, diesel, cardboard, ozone. Each molecule carries traces of everything else, forming an atmospheric montage where past and present, performance and residue, fold into one another. “We dance like molecules,” Malašauskas notes, spinning a hula hoop, an act of compulsive improvisation. Beginning at Canal Street and moving toward SoHo, the dérive is guided by molecules rather than maps: smells appear, vanish, and reappear like performers finding their cues. The city becomes a moving hologram, each fragment containing the whole, each inhalation revealing a different composition of time. The piece extends the artist’s exploration of immaterial exhibitions — a choreography of encounter, trace, and disappearance, and never back the same way.
Co-produced by Performa and Extra Extra. Curated by Defne Ayas, Senior Curator-at-Large, Performa, and Director, Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and Samira Benlaloua, Artistic Director, Extra Extra.
A Performa and Extra Extra Project. Produced by Performa and Extra Extra. Supported by Creative Industries Fund, Consulate General of the Netherlands, Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Mondriaan Fund, the Municipality of Rotterdam, and the Netherland-America Foundation.


