Enjoy the Now
Lithuania
2025
The series Enjoy the Now explores the strategies used by the media to dehumanise migrants coming to Lithuania from Belarus in summer 2021. Paulius Petraitis has gathered a corpus of broadly distributed press images, where the migrants’ faces are pixelated to hide their identity, removing their humanity by erasing any sign of their presence. These pixelated blocks, which act on the viewer’s empathy, are made by the artist into a background for a series of Lithuanian landscapes, their lushness looking almost strange. By revisiting these sites, these places where migrants crossed over to his country, Paulius Petraitis goes on a quest to find traces of this invisible human presence. But he cannot find any, further underlining this effort to erase their identity and belonging.
With the support of the Lithuanian Culture Institute
In partnership with WhiteWall
Portfolio
About the artist
Paulius Petraitis was born in 1985 and is based in Vilnius. His art practice relies on technologies used on communication networks and explores how images can take on a new meaning in collective and individual contexts. His artist books are found in major collections, namely in the MoMA and Met libraries.