LIEPA SOFIJA VAREIKAITĖ
It Hurts So Much It’s Shameful
Art installation, video work, sound work, film negatives, artist's book
2025 06 02–08 25
Exhibition opening on June 6 at 6 PM.
The exhibition is curated by Marija Marcelionytė-Paliukė
First, they told me I was a human being. Later, they specified I was a girl whose name started with the letter J. She said that J was an ungrateful little slob because she hadn’t cleaned her room again. They said I was bound to become someone. He said I was the only thing keeping him alive on this earth. She said you must always greet the neighbors. I was told not to cry, not to scream, not to complain, and to expect nothing from the world. They said my shirt had to be white and my hair brushed. She taught me to walk with smaller steps, because girls don’t walk with big ones. They said I had to study hard and always tell the truth. He said this drink was definitely the last one—but it never was. She smeared orange, stinking powder on my face and said now I was almost pretty. They said that when some aunt offers you money, you should refuse twice and only accept it if she offers a third time. They said, said, said—
and then they forgot it all.
Layer after layer, I shed my skin and throw it to the ground. Metal frames of morality hold up my spine, yet every time it’s touched, it turns out to be far too fragile. Every thought, before it reaches another, is gutted. And even after passing through a thousand sieves, even worn down to a barely visible thread, it gets sent back — for yet another round of processing.
A few days before the exhibition opening, the cleaner collects my skins and throws them in the trash. She says they were lying around where they shouldn’t have been. Later, I find them and return them to the same non-places. Everything feels like a foreign body — nothing finds its place, everything ends as if it never began. Everything ends befo
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Liepa Sofija Vareikaitė (b. 1995) concludes her Master’s studies in Graphic Arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Faculty of Vilnius, Department of Graphics, with the work It Hurts So Much It’s Shameful. In this piece, the artist explores the phenomenon of fragmented identity and the influence of memory (or self-memory) in shaping that fragmentation. The process of rewriting and perpetually rethinking the self takes on a visual form in the installation.
The viewer is met by what appear to be carelessly discarded pieces of skin (latex), a video and sound work capturing the act of self-rewriting and the deconstruction of noise, as well as overexposed, accidental, never-developed images from a c
hildhood home that question the reality of memory. Nearby, on small glass cubes, rests a silkscreen print-memory, and behind it — an artist’s book conceived as a never-ending manuscript. A crumbling lump of plaster supports a pale-blue metal framework, filled with research and writing collected throughout the years of study — never shaped into a final theoretical form.
During her MA studies, the artist held two solo exhibitions — Vakarėjant išteku jūron (Arts Printing House, Vilnius) and Visos vėtros baigiasi (Utena) — actively participated in group exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad, and led educational activities (creative workshops). In 2024, she was awarded a research grant from the Lithuanian Research Council, and her work FUGA MARIS received first prize in the Permąstant MKČ competition, organized by the Vilnius Auction and Vilnius Academy of Arts.
Final thesis supervisor Marija Marcelionytė-Paliukė
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