Vaida Stepanovaitė

Dr Vaida Stepanovaite is a London-based organiser, researcher, and curator from Lithuania. She has been primarily preoccupied with navigating the evolving forms of togetherness under systemic duress. Vaida spent the last decade running art organisations and spaces, including the Art Workers' Union in Lithuania, and co-founded initiatives including the Art Criticism Awards in Lithuania whilst heading Artnews.lt. She has also edited and published several books and numerous texts on art practice and theory, and has had curatorial, research, and learning engagements with documenta 14, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, ICA, BAK, and other institutions.

In the last year, she curated the exhibition 'The Gearwheel, Hardworking Hands, and the Tired Exhibition Visitor' at Editorial in Vilnius, navigating the tensions between visible and invisible labour in the arts; and the Resistance Song residency at Sodas 2123 in Vilnius, dedicated to exploring the intersection of resistance, solidarity, and healing through sound-making. With the Art Workers' Union, she also participated in the 15th Kaunas Biennial (curated by Adomas Narkevičius).

Vaida holds a PhD in Advanced Practices (Visual Cultures) from Goldsmiths, for a practice-based research project entitled 'Living Unsettledness Out: Collectivity After Collectivisation'. In this project, she examined how emergent subjects navigate historical change and weather the loss of state institutions, political promises, and historical truths. From a historically embedded yet highly subjective stance, she explored the bouts of optimism and unsettledness arising around collectivist forms in the arts. In real-but-fictionalised situations, unresolved pasts and uncertain futures were contested by lost family members, jaded artists, young curators, working mothers, unemployed men, exhibition invigilators, radicals, drunks, killjoys, archivists, and art historians. At Goldsmiths, Vaida also taught and co-ordinated a research programme.

Living Unsettledness Out