Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter exhibition “Metrica No. 5”
Metrica No. 5 is a multi-channel video installation by artists Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter, commissioned and presented for the first time for Rupert’s storefront exhibition space. The solo exhibition brings together a series of documented performances, directed by the artists, that feel through infrastructures of thought, history, and memory.
Exhibition can be visited Wednesdays-Saturdays 2PM-6PM or by appointment: [email protected]
Shot and performed on location in 2025, the artwork follows three psychotherapists as they enter the storage rooms of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. Surrounded by shelves of documents, the women at the center of the performance score listen, question, and respond as the archive attempts to describe its fears and desires. Critical questions of selfhood, consciousness, and collective experience form and unravel as the sessions reflect upon the procedures of psychotherapy as they might apply to a subject whose “mind” is composed of an unfathomable mass of undead human writing.
This new work is also part of Metrica, an evolving series of performances that stage encounters between public archives, psychoanalysts, and artificial intelligence, initiated by the artist duo in 2023 during their first stay in Vilnius at the Rupert residency programme. Their initial interest in land ownership histories in the region led Benedict and Rueter to two distinct repositories within Lithuanian history: the books of the Lithuanian Metrika—foundational administrative records of the 13th–17th century Duchy of Lithuania, held in 200 codices that have all been removed from Lithuania (the existing volumes are now in Moscow)—which have been digitized in a limited way by historians at Vilnius University; and oral histories of the 1990s post-Soviet Lithuanian administrative processes, developed by the newly independent state to re-privatize and repatriate land, which eventually resulted in a new digital government land register. Out of encounters between these archives, the artists, and artificial intelligence systems, the Metrica series produces a variety of conversational forms that engage what might be understood as the institutional unconscious.
For the most recent performances (Metrica No. 5-7, 2025 – ongoing), Benedict and Rueter invite professional psychotherapists to conduct intake sessions with the “psyches” of public archives. Voiced through an AI agent engineered by the artists, the archival psyches draw from historical land records, administrative documents, and literary texts – official records recast as personal memories.
Metrica No. 5 Production and post-production team: Lukas Heistinger, Laurynas Skeisgiela, Martynas Norvaišas, Kipras Čėsna, Lukas Karalius, Giulio Squillaciotti, Cesium Sound, Lennert De Taeye.
About the artists:
Working across video, installation, and performance, Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter stage encounters between industrial processes, professional grammars, and the human body — arranging what might be described as unlikely meetings between estranged landscapes. Rooted in the legacy of 1960s and 70s US conceptual art but driven by a distinctly contemporary engagement with infrastructure, algorithms, and administrative power, their practice takes professional and technical operations — legal, logistical, architectural — and recasts them as performances, probing the boundaries of what such systems can and cannot absorb. Objects and videos serve as documents of these interventions, which unfold across sites where the built environment, bureaucratic procedure, and psychic life overlap. The work begins from a simple proposition and spirals outward, surfacing the mythological dimensions latent in the supposedly mundane, and creating temporary spaces where the resonances of collective experience can be felt.
Curator: Viktorija Šiaulytė.
Assistant curator and production manager: Augustė Verikaitė.
Technical team: Matas Šatūnas, Jokūbas Čižikas.
Communication: Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė.
Editor of the Lithuanian language: Evelina Zenkutė.
Thank you: Kaunas Artist House, Vytautas Ubonis and Coingate, Monika Lipšic, Liam Murtaugh, Austė Marcinkevičienė, Ioanna Valavanis, Milda Dainovskytė, Daura Polonskytė, Algirdas Jakas, Inesa Brašiškė, Natalja Mamedova-Ryčkovė, Sandra Bagdonaitė-Jankauskienė, Adelė Petravičiūtė, Ray Olivi, Monika Kisieliūtė, Amelija Ramonaitė, Nojus Šimkus.
Production of ‘Metrica No. 5’ has been funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Mondriaan Fonds.
Rupert Spring Season public programme is funded by Vilnius City Municipality.
Rupert partners: INVL Family Office.
