Raimundas Malašauskas

Raimundas Malašauskas is a curator and writer born in Vilnius. He wanted to become a chef on a transoceanic ship. Instead, he made exhibitions that happen through hypnosis, television programs where every episode was simultaneously the pilot and the finale, and cocktails named after the city he left.

From 1995 to 2006 he worked at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, where he co-produced CAC TV, an experimental weekly show that ran under the slogan "Every program is a pilot, every program is the final episode," and curated Black Market Worlds, the 9th Baltic Triennial of International Art (2005). In 2007 he co-wrote the libretto for Cellar Door, an opera by Loris Gréaud produced at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Since then he has worked itinerantly — Palermo, Cairo, Brussels, Mexico City, Paris, New York — treating mobility as research. His projects include Repetition Island (Centre Pompidou, 2010), Into the Belly of a Dove (Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2010), oO, the Lithuanian and Cyprus pavilions at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013, Special Mention), Fusiform Gyrus (Lisson Gallery, London, 2013), Meeting Points 8 (Brussels, Beirut, Cairo, 2016–17), and trust & confusion, an eight-month live art exhibition at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021). He co-curated the 9th Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre, 2013) and the 9th Liverpool Biennial (2017).
His longest-running project, Hypnotic Show (ongoing since 2008), is an exhibition experienced through hypnosis, developed with hypnotherapist Marcos Lutyens and presented at dOCUMENTA (13), among other venues.

His selected writings are collected in Paper Exhibition (Sternberg Press, 2012) and Suzon (König, 2023). In 2026 he received the Lithuanian Government Prize for Culture and Art.

The Art of Chaos

For two decades I have made exhibitions in galleries and museums, as well as in minds, kitchens, correspondences and conversations. When I tried to give that body of work a retrospective form (a “Curatorial Retrospective”?), the available formats failed for a reason worth stating: cataloguing collectively produced encounters under one name re-centralises a single author, which is what the work was arranged to avoid. What appeared in its place was Suzon—an inventory that disperses rather than consolidates—and a set of names that are not mine.

This paper follows that displacement into a second case. In the 1970s, a villa was built on the Baltic coast at Palanga for a leader who never arrived. Guarded until 1991, it is now leased under a twenty-one-year concession and destined to become a spa. An exhibition was being prepared in its twenty-two rooms, in the interval before renovation. It was cancelled.

The Unschool of Curating in Cluj, under the heading The Art of Chaos, proposed that curatorial knowledge is produced through what stays unresolved—that chaos is a condition to be respected rather than resolved. That proposition is easier to sustain while the frame remains a school. It changes when chaos is not a method anyone chose but the condition of the site, and when the site decides.
I will speak about two things that did not take the form they were meant to, about how a retrospective might be staged when no template exists, and about what a position is when it cannot be occupied.