Lina Lapelytė
Born in 1984, lives and works in Vilnius.
Lina Lapelytė is a Lithuanian artist, composer, and performer whose interdisciplinary work navigates the fluid boundaries between sound, performance, visual art, and social commentary. Trained as both a classical violinist and a composer, Lapelytė brings a unique musical sensibility to her visual and performative projects, often exploring themes of labor, gender, vulnerability, and the politics of voice.
Her artistic language is grounded in collaboration and the staging of shared experience. Working across opera, performance, and installation, Lapelytė challenges conventional hierarchies of art and performance by engaging with non-professional performers and unconventional spaces. Her practice frequently dismantles traditional roles – artist/viewer, performer/audience, high/low culture – creating situations that are both intimate and disarming.
Lapelytė gained international acclaim with the opera Sun & Sea (2019), created with collaborators Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė. The piece, which won the Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale, unfolds as a durational performance on an artificial beach, where sunbathers sing about climate anxiety, ecological grief, and the banality of everyday life. Subtle yet piercing, the work exemplifies Lapelytė’s ability to merge beauty and discomfort, humor and melancholy, into a seamless emotional landscape.
Her solo projects are equally rich in affective power. In works like Candy Shop – The Circus and Ladies, she reinterprets popular or traditionally masculine musical genres through the voices and bodies of women and older performers, drawing attention to structures of power, objectification, and representation. These performances are not didactic but poetic, often unfolding slowly and with quiet intensity.
Lapelytė’s work has been presented at the Serpentine Galleries (London), Kaunas Biennial, the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, and the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (Brussels), among others. Through sound, movement, and shared vulnerability, she continues to craft deeply human performances that linger long after they end.
