Any-time-now is a speech-based performance that draws heavily on the history of the Republic of Paulava, a self-governing peasant microstate in the eighteenth century Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With its own currency, laws, and army, the republic dissolved after just 26 years.
Through non-linear storytelling, the performance layers historical fact, hearsay, and speculation without distinguishing where one thread ends and another begins. It explores what becomes of a ‘state’, whether political or personal, once its active, contested existence comes to an end. This is the same stillness that settles over a court’s evidence once a verdict has been filed, or over a person’s life reduced to an epitaph. Yet this stillness, though seemingly frozen, is not peaceful. Instead, the performance focuses on a quieter conflict between the active and the passive, between history and its interpretation.
Joelis Aškinis is a Vilnius-based artist working across performance and video. His recent work centres on speech-based performance assembled from appropriated language – collected quotes, institutional jargon, overheard conversations, and statistics – layered together until any single, coherent position dissolves into irony. In parallel, he maintains an ongoing, undisclosed series of interventions in public space, adopting a worker’s uniform to carry out invented, mundane tasks around the city.
His work has been presented at M.K. Ciurlionis Museum of Art, Performance Art Weekend organised by Kaunas Artists’ House, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA), Riga (2025); the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, as part of the JCDecaux Award exhibition (2023); LTQ’23: Communities, Contemporary Art Quadriennale, Titanikas, Vilnius (2023); ‘Evakuacija. Muziejininkų maištas 2’, Vilnius Academy of Arts (2023); and ‘☐’ Titanikas, Vilnius (2023).
Earlier printmaking exhibitions include the Hida-Takayama International Contemporary Woodblock-prints Triennale, Takayama (2020); the 3rd International Print Biennale Yerevan, ‘HAY ART’ Cultural Centre, Yerevan (2019); the 3rd Kaunas International Printmaking Biennale, Mykolas Žilinskas Art Gallery, Kaunas (2019); GraphicMatters Poster Biennale, Stokvishallen, Breda, where he was a laureate (2019); the Culture Night exhibition ‘Press’, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius (2019); and the 1st International Print Biennale India, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2018).
Main image credit: Monika Matilda Andrulytė