CARMEN

A video installation by Ieva Lygnugarytė

Carmen is a video and sound installation by artist Ieva Lygnugarytė that reactivates a failed sixteenth-century diplomatic gesture to examine (in)visibility, power, and cultural legitimacy. The work takes as its point of departure Carmen de statura, feritate ac venatione bisontis (1521/23), a Neo-Latin poem by Nicolaus Hussovianus written to accompany the gift of a straw-stuffed European bison from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Pope Leo X. A gesture that failed with the pope’s sudden death and remained outside canonical histories. 

Rather than recounting this episode as a closed historical narrative, the 30-minute video imagines the poet’s gradual transformation into the animal he once hoped would secure him institutional recognition, collapsing Renaissance humanist ambition and contemporary cinematic language into a speculative meditation on desire, failure, and unresolved belonging.

Curated by Meral Karacaoğlan, Carmen will premiere in Venice, alongside the 61st Art Biennale 2026.

Ieva Lygnugarytė (b. 1998) is an artist and researcher working with memory, time, ethics, paradox, and urban space. She is currently based in Cambridge, MA, where she is pursuing a Master in Design Studies in Narratives at Harvard University. Her current research project produced in a collaboration with Meral Karacaoglan, Carmen: Utopias of Belonging, traces forgotten entanglements between European history, animality, and the politics of taming. She also collaborates as part of CASE.

Artist

Ieva Lygnugarytė


Executive Producer 

Meral Karacaoğlan


Actors 

Paulius Janušonis
Maja Wittrup


Sound Design 

Miša Skalskis


Composer 

Oswald Huỳnh


Violoncello 

Frederick Winterson


Costume Development 

Thomas Trenchard

Graphic DesignRobin Brass


The presentation of Lygnugarytė’s video installation unfolds in the Oratorio dei Crociferi, a still sacred space historically shaped by devotion, care, and passage. Originating as one of Venice’s earliest charitable hostels for pilgrims and travelers, the Oratorio complex holds centuries of arrival, transit, and temporary belonging, carrying an enduring sense of community within its walls. 

Conceived as a site-specific installation, Carmen enters into dialogue with this history of movement, positioning the viewer within a panoramic situation where past and present migrations become palpable.

The interior is entirely enveloped by a late sixteenth-century fresco cycle by Jacopo Palma il Giovane (1544–1628). The walls and ceiling entomb the visitor in a charged visual field of devotional excess and painted bodies, against which the video work unfolds, putting contemporary questions of belonging into intimate contact with centuries of displaced faith and desire.