Exhibitions

Eglė Ridikaitė’s exhibition, through an unexpected artistic ges­ture, weaves together sites of faith, painful historical experienc­es, and a sense of present vulnerability. With striking clarity, serenity, and simplicity, Depositions unfolds as a silent yet con­ceptually dense narrative about the city. It invites us to experi­ence, simultaneously, the layered histories of prewar Jewish and Christian Vilnius, while tracing processes of survival and extinc­tion, life and its erasure in memory.
The impetus for the work was the archaeological excavations of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, demolished during the Soviet era. During these excavations, fragments of the synagogue floor were unearthed beneath the windows of the artist’s studio at the time. The beauty revealed in these remnants inspired Ridikaitė to capture them, translating into painting the life-size surfaces of the synagogue’s bimah (the platform for reading the Torah) and mikvah (the ritual ablution basin), the moon-like bases of its columns, and other exposed fragments. These works evoke a sense of wonder, revealing beauty as a gift of time and place, and allowing us to perceive, in the humble floor once trodden by many feet, colourful mosaic concrete ornaments worthy admi­ration. The floor of the Great Synagogue, crafted by Vilnius arti­sans, becomes an entry point into the city’s heritage – its mak­ers as well as its destroyers.
St George’s Church was not chosen as the site for Ridikaitė’s installation by chance. Desecrated and converted into storage during the Soviet period, the space carries a renewed symbolic charge – as both a temporary refuge and a silent witness. When the sanctuary became a depository of the so-called Book Palace, dedicated librarians secretly preserved there part of the Jewish written heritage, including Torah scrolls. In the artist’s imagi­nation, the floor of the Great Synagogue – having absorbed the sound of the Torah read aloud countless times – follows the trac­es of these scrolls to the place where they were hidden, where their lingering presence can almost be sensed. The fan of the bimah echoes the stars of the presbytery. Contemporaries, as if of the same generation, meet and enter into dialogue: the floor of the destroyed synagogue and the devastated church.

Eglė Ridikaitė (b. 1966) is an artist and recipient of the Govern­ment Prize for Culture and Art (2018) and the Lithuanian Natio­nal Prize for Culture and Art (2020). She has held nearly twen­ty solo exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad, including Cultured Floors – Entrances at TSEKH Art Gallery in Kyiv (2021) and Cycle Heritage: Grandma’s Scarves at Gdańsk City Gallery (2014).

Organiser Church Heritage Museum
Curators: Violeta Indriūnienė, Rita Pauliukevičiūtė, Laura Petrauskaitė
Architect Justinas Dudėnas
Designer Agnė Dautartaitė-Krutulė
Photographer Vidmantas Ilčiukas
Installation team: MB „Special Mentions Projects“, Jurgis Paškevičius
The archaeological excavations of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius were led by: dr. Jon Seligman (Israel), Justinas Račys (Lithuania)
Media sponsors: bernardinai.lt, “Artuma”, “IQ”, “Kelionė”

Museum sponsors: Archdiocese of Vilnius, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality