ABEJUR, or BOTHWHERE was a self-organised photography exhibition by three artists – Donata Šiaudvytytė, Morta Narkauskaitė, and Alexandra Bondarev. The theme, developed through both visual and live conversations, was directly encoded in the expansive title of the show: bothwhere referred to a state permeating not only the artists’ creative practices but also their lives – manifesting uniquely in each of their works.

Being in two places at once was not merely a physical condition here; the works pointed above all to conceptually liminal spaces: fiction and reality, dream and ‘objective’ perception, mythology woven into contemporaneity, water as a threshold between states. They also revealed certain universals embedded within apparent dichotomies: harmony between nature and city life, human–animal coexistence, the playfulness of both child and adult, the sacred otherworld within the earthly – and, above all, beauty that was omnipresent: bothwhere, and everywhere. These images also carried the authors’ intentional agency, bearing witness to life unfolding on both sides of the lens. Authorship, too, appeared bothwhere – in the act of capturing images and in the art de vivre. Finally, the central axis of the exhibition was the body, visually and conceptually uniting the show into a cohesive whole: most often naked, sculptural, always real, not limiting but enabling a simultaneous existence in multidimensional spaces.

Our autonomous, independent, and intentional coming together to create this joint exhibition – without hierarchical roles, without funding, and outside traditional institutional art spaces – also became a manifesto: to create for the sake of creating, and to foster an open, self-sustaining community. In doing so, we hoped not only to connect with more like-minded people, but also to inspire other creators to gather and work freely, unbound by institutional expectations or conventional norms of the art field, and, if it’s not too banal to say, to create from the heart.


The exhibition took place at the VU Botanical Garden in Vingis and ran from 16 May to 6 June 2025