The exhibition will run from August 12 to September 28, 2025.

Exhibition AKIMIRKA NEBLĖSTA (THE MOMENT DOESN’T FADE AWAY) by folk artist Modestas Grigaliūnas and film director and photographer from Ukraine Oleksandr Dirdovsky.

Great art is often born in bleak times. In the Soviet Union, an intermediary emerged between the artist and the viewer: the Soviet state. Nonetheless, non-conformist art existed as well. In Salantai Town, in 1970, father and son Orvidai began to create a unique homestead. In this labyrinth without dead ends, made of stones from the Ice Age, the friends of Vilius Orvidas, such as Rimas Salius, Dominykas Čepas, Modestas Grigaliūnas, Adolfas Teresius, Henrikas Ratautas, etc., manifested their inner freedom and spiritual world.

“By presenting an exhibition of Modestas Grigaliūnas’ sculptures, exhibiting photographs of sculptures by Vilius Orvidas and Modestas Grigaliūnas and showing the film “Wooden Sculptures by Vilius Orvidas. Aware,” we are trying to draw attention not only to the surviving sculptures, but also to the shadows of the ones that disappeared. Unfortunately, the fading beauty and depth of many of the sculptures in the Orvidai homestead are becoming unnecessary, and the transience of this place is turning into eternity,” explains the curator of the exhibition, priest Dovydas Grigaliūnas.

“When I first went to the Orvidai homestead, it was only a few months after I came back after my exile. I returned from Siberia in 1986. Then I found a mood of despair and futility in Lithuania, and those friends who had previously been involved in dissident resistance activities had already dispersed. I went to the homestead completely by chance, and it was there that the idea first came into my mind: resistance to the Soviet system could have been different. I mean, it was different as well. It was Vilius’s resistance…,” remembers priest Julius Sasnauskas.