Vabamu presents an artist talk and slideshow presentation by Jonas Kulikauskas on his ongoing project I Often Forget – a photographic and installation-based examination of historical omission, memory, and the Holocaust in Lithuania. The event takes place on August 22, at 2 pm/14.00. 

I Often Forget emerged from a profound absence. Raised in a Lithuanian Catholic community in Southern California, Kulikauskas received no formal education about the mass murder of Lithuanian Jews – a genocide that claimed most of the country’s Jewish population. Returning to Vilnius on a Fulbright fellowship in 2021, he confronted that silence through sustained artistic research. Mounting a World War II-era lens onto a large-format 8×10 camera, he photographed contemporary daily life within the boundaries of what was once the Vilna Ghetto, pairing those images with survivor testimonies and site-specific historical documentation. The resulting works interrogate the layered relationship between place, memory, and collective forgetting. In his talk, Kulikauskas traces the conceptual foundations, research process, technical challenges, and ethical stakes of the project.

Advance registratrion is required HERE. 

The exhibition I Often Forget will open in the KGB Prison Cells on August 20.

Jonas Kulikauskas is an American-Lithuanian interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice critically examines communities, traditions, and institutions. Recurring themes in his work include historical omission, cultural desecration, identity, and kindness. A Fulbright Scholar, his work is held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution and the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Lithuania. He taught at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California from 2002 to 2022. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Užupis Art Incubator in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I Often Forget continues to evolve as a traveling exhibition.