Opening a Portal

I have long thought about space as being alive – something that stretches and folds. In a similar way, I do not experience time as linear, but as layered, circular, elastic. The work of the visionary Lithuanian-American artist and architect Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019) has long been important for me, because her thinking made this intuition tangible.

Kasuba was a pioneer of installation art, creating immersive environments that were the embodiment of her research into the interplay of material, space and human perception. I had the chance to visit the home she built on the edge of a desert in New Mexico (where she relocated in the early 2000s) several times, and later, in 2019, I was lucky enough to meet her. I discovered how closely our thoughts and interests overlapped: during our conversations, she described space as continuous and without fixed edges, and approached time as something elastic rather than linear.

This way of thinking affected my understanding of scale, for example, and how I wanted to explore it in my practice – shifting between the personal and the monumental, and from the cosmic to the bodily. In my new 16-mm film, Telstar 2025, which I created during a residency in St Ives, a microscopic drawing made with seawater and ground minerals has a similar presence to a vast landscape. A stone circle can be as expansive as a planetary orbit. Different landscapes hold time differently.

My practice moves through sites shaped by deep time and short human histories: riverbeds, seabeds, nuclear infrastructure, wetlands, underwater data centres, ruins. These are environments where myth, science and technology coexist, and where boundaries are unstable. I am drawn to thresholds: oxygen-depleted seas, rivers that refuse to merge, cities that are slowly sinking, data or nuclear waste that is accumulating beyond our capacity to store it. These are places where systems break down.

In ancient mythologies that predate patriarchal hierarchies and linear time, rivers are living entities and standing stones are portals. I think of my films, installations and performances as portals to otherwise hard-to-reach places, such as Etruscan caves, neutrino observatories, or aphotic zones extending deep beneath the ocean surface, where sunlight can no longer penetrate. In several works, I appear as a mermaid or siren, a hybrid figure. These shapeshifters serve as guides across these thresholds. Through such beings, the portals to other realms can be opened.

I often approach these sites as a future archaeologist looking back at our present from a time after collapse, when human systems have already failed but their traces remain. Many of the sites I film, such as decommissioned submarine bases and satellite stations, were built as promises of progress, but today lie abandoned, disappearing into geological strata. I already see even the newest and most advanced products of science as ruins. My camera is like a tool, scraping away the layers of dirt, the strata of accumulated time.

In my current exhibition at Tate St Ives, elements from the moving image works I have created over the past decade are collaged across multiple screens. I think of them as fragments – both of a larger, unfinished mythology for a planet in crisis, acknowledging loss and decay, and of speculative futures.

One of these is Circular Time: For Aleksandra Kasuba 2021, a homage to the artist inspired by our shared interest in the invisible threads that connect art and science. I remain deeply grateful for our meeting, which was formative – an encounter between kindred spirits. The work draws on Kasuba’s broader thinking on space, as well as her Shell Dwellers 1989, a series of paper collages that propose ways of inhabiting space without conquering it. These works offer another relationship to space and time that is grounded in cohabitation. At a moment when the structures we once trusted feel increasingly fragile, Kasuba’s vision reminds us that other architectures of being remain possible.

^{Emilija Škarnulytė, Tate St Ives, until 12 April}

^{Aleksandra Kasuba, Tate St Ives, 2 May – 4 October}

^{Emilija Škarnulytė is an artist who lives and works nomadically.}

^{Emilija Škarnulytė is supported by Tate Members. Aleksandra Kasuba is supported by the Aleksandra Kasuba Exhibition Supporters Circle and Tate Members.}