The many roles of a curator | Adomas Narkevičius talk

On 5 August at 6:00 pm, the Emerging Curators Platform invites you to “The Many Roles of a Curator: Between Ideas and Everyday Practice”, a presentation of curator and art historian Adomas Narkevičius’s practice, taking place at Estafetė Café-Bar.

In this talk, Adomas will discuss the many different roles a curator takes on when working on exhibitions in museums and project spaces, public programmes and alternative education initiatives, national pavilions, and international biennials.

→ 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒊𝒔 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒈𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆 𝒉𝒆𝒍𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉.
→ 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒂𝒍𝒌 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒃𝒆 𝒇𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒅 𝒃𝒚 𝒂 𝑸&𝑨 𝒔𝒆𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏.

Adomas will reflect on these experiences through his work curating exhibitions at London’s long-standing not-for-profit, Cell Project Space, developing residency and alternative education programmes at Rupert, and working with MO Museum, Kaunas Biennial, and the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Drawing on his current role as Founding Director of Upė Foundation, established in London in late 2025 to foster exchange between the Baltic and international art contexts, he will consider what it means to ‘curate’ a newly-founded organisation.

The presentation will pay attention to the specificity of curatorial work: the constant back and forth between big-picture ideas, artistic conversations, and everyday practice, such as negotiations, conflict resolution, finding compromises, and the many other joys and challenges that surface when working with artists, institutions, funders, and teams of different scales.

The event is part of the Emerging Curators Platform (ECP), an educational and mentorship programme for emerging curators aimed at strengthening practical curatorial skills and fostering collaboration within the field of contemporary art. This year’s edition of the platform is curated by artist and curator Ona Juciūtė.

SODAS 2123 activities are funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and the Vilnius City Municipality.

Adomas Narkevičius is an art historian and curator, Founding Director of Upė Foundation, London, Curator of the 15th Kaunas Biennial (2025), and co-curator of the Latvian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale (2026). From 2021 to 2025, he was Curator at Cell Project Space, London.

His research takes untimely artwork as a way to reconsider the perceived ‘belatedness’ of twentieth-century Baltic art histories, with a particular focus on nonlinear forms of historical time, embodiment, sexuality and the limits of representation.

His curatorial projects include exhibitions and programmes at MO museum, Cell Project Space, Rupert, Gianni Manhattan, FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius). From 2017 to 2019, he curated Rupert’s Alternative Education, Public and Residency programmes. As a visiting lecturer and tutor, he has recently worked with Goldsmiths, University College London and the Royal College of Art.