Nikita Kadan and Natalia Sielewicz Announced as Curators of the 16th Baltic Triennial

The Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius has announced the appointment of artist Nikita Kadan and curator and writer Natalia Sielewicz as curators of the 16th Baltic Triennial.

Kadan, an artist based in Kyiv, and Sielewicz, Chief Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, will lead the artistic vision for the next edition of the long-running international exhibition organised by CAC Vilnius.

The curators were selected through an invitation-based process by a seven-member international committee chaired by Valentinas Klimašauskas, Director of CAC Vilnius. The committee also included Virginija Januškevičiūtė, Edgaras Gerasimovičius, Inga Lāce, Maria Arusoo, Sebastian Cichocki, and Cosmin Costinas.

Commenting on the selection, Klimašauskas said:

‘The curators were selected to provide space for experimentation, dialogue, and sensitivity towards the larger region. Nikita and Natalia were chosen for their ability to create a sensitive, open, and critical conversation with art, history and the public.’

Regarding their proposal for the upcoming edition, the curators write:

‘Arising from an ongoing dialogue on grief and resurrection that has come to mark our friendship, we reflect on what it means to live after an event that breaks the continuity of meaning – when experience, language, and the world itself are altered at their foundations.

We speak from within a position that is itself unstable. As artists who sometimes curate, and as curators unsure where our creative practice ends, we wish to occupy a double position that unsettles fixed definitions and singular authority. Our roles are relational and continually negotiated, shaped as much by doubt and listening as by intention.

From this position, we propose an exhibition that approaches despair and mourning not as pathologies, but as spaces of careful listening. Inhabiting despair thus becomes a form of fidelity: an attunement to the faint echoes of what might yet return, to the resonance of hope that lingers beneath lament, and to the quiet call of what has withdrawn—awaiting those who can still hear it.’

– Curators Nikita Kadan and Natalia Sielewicz

The Baltic Triennial, one of the longest-running projects of CAC Vilnius, was first established in 1979 as a triennial for young Baltic artists at the Palace of Exhibitions in Vilnius. Following Lithuania’s regained independence in 1990, the CAC assumed responsibility for the project and has since developed it into a major platform for contemporary art in the region. Since its 6th edition in 1995, the Triennial has invited different curators for each edition and presented artists from across the world.

The most recent edition, the 15th Baltic Triennial, took place in 2024, curated by Tom Engels and Maya Tounta. The project recently concluded with the launch of the two-volume publication Remain in Zero / Same Day, tracing its development across 2023–2024. The book launch took place at Sapieha Palace and included curators’ readings and a piano programme performed by pianist Han-Gyeol Lie. The publication features photographic sequences by Saulė Gerikaitė and Adrianna Glaviano.

Traditionally, each Baltic Triennial includes a prologue event one year before the main exhibition. The prologue to the 16th Baltic Triennial will take place in mid-2026, offering an early glimpse of the themes of the upcoming exhibition.

About the Curators

Nikita Kadan is an artist based in Kyiv. His work focuses on past trauma and everyday survival in Ukraine, with a particular interest in collective memory and historical politics. Since 2022, his practice has explicitly addressed the war in Ukraine. Kadan has also curated projects including ‘Tryvoha’, presented in the basement of Voloshyn Gallery, converted into a bomb shelter during the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, and ‘Looking into the Gaps I–IV’ (2024–26), a travelling exhibition realised across Kyiv, Dnipro, Lviv, Sokołowsko, Berlin, Teshima and Tokyo.

Natalia Sielewicz is an art historian and writer and currently Chief Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Over the past decade she has curated numerous exhibitions at the museum, most recently ‘Maria Jarema. Cracked Modernism’ (2026, with Éric de Chassey). In 2026 she will curate the Estonian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, presenting the artist Merike Estna. Her work often explores feminism, affective politics, and the technological conditions shaping contemporary subjectivity.

Photo: Nikita Kadan, Natalia Sielewicz
Photographer: Karol Grygoruk