CARMEN: Utopias of Belonging

Carmen is a video and sound installation by artist Ieva Lygnugarytė that reactivates a failed sixteenth-century diplomatic gesture to examine (in)visibility, power, and cultural legitimacy. About “Carmen: Utopias of Belonging” unfolds at Venice’s Oratorio dei Crociferi from 1–31 May 2026, alongside the 61st Venice Art Biennale. The exhibition presents the new video and sound installation “Carmen” (2026) by Ieva Lygnugarytė and is curated by Meral Karacaoğlan. The work takes as its point of departure Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis (1521/23), a Neo-Latin poem by Nicolaus Hussovianus written to accompany the gift of a straw-stuffed European bison from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Pope Leo X. A gesture that failed with the pope’s sudden death and remained outside canonical histories. Rather than recounting this episode as a closed historical narrative, the 30-minute video imagines the poet’s gradual transformation into the animal he once hoped would secure him institutional recognition, collapsing Renaissance humanist ambition and contemporary cinematic language into a speculative meditation on desire, failure, and unresolved belonging. The presentation of Lygnugarytė’s video installation unfolds in the Oratorio dei Crociferi, a still sacred space historically shaped by devotion, care, and passage. Conceived as a site-specific installation, “Carmen” enters into dialogue with this history of movement, positioning the viewer within a panoramic situation where past and present migrations become palpable. Read more Toggle Film / Video Multi-disciplinary Audio / Sound