AEP Participants 2026/27

In September, Rupert launched the fourteenth edition of the Alternative Education Programme (AEP). The six-month transdisciplinary programme brings together nine international creative practitioners working across installation, performance, dance, architecture, writing, sound, food, choreography and participatory practices.

The programme supports the development of artistic practices, research and ideas through individual mentorship, collective learning and experimentation. This year, the AEP returns to its original principles, with an emphasis on continuous personal mentorship tailored to each participant’s practice and focused on the development of project proposals leading towards their public presentation in February 2027.

Participants

Magdalena Beliavska

Magdalena Beliavska is an artist, architect and researcher based in Vilnius, Lithuania, whose practice moves between space, text, performance and architecture. She holds a Master’s degree in Architecture and has researched urbicides. Her current practice explores sleep and sleeplessness through performance, research, textiles, objects and writing. Her research-based projects include The Church of Urban Dreamers (2022) and A Room to Dream (2023), and in 2024 she presented her solo exhibition Revolution in the Whale. (Sleep)lessness as an Act of Resistance and Participation at A-XY gallery in Kaunas. She co-founded and co-curated Popierius.digital (2021–2024), an experimental platform focused on publishing the unpublishable.

Inga Galinytė

Inga Galinytė is an interdisciplinary artist and performer whose practice draws on narratives of personal and collective experience. Through performance, movement and installation, she explores ways of activating bodies that remain open to memory, reality and fiction. Her practice is informed by methods of diary and correspondence, with fragments gathered from everyday life becoming scripts that balance deliberate structure and free association. She holds a BA in Visual Arts and an MA from the Textile Department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Laima Jaunzema

Laima Jaunzema is a Latvian artist working across performance, choreography, artistic research and collective learning. Her practice explores the body as a site where personal histories, cultural inheritances and collective structures intersect. Through performance, movement research and alter egos such as Lizard Woman, she investigates questions of agency, access, belonging and knowledge production. Alongside her artistic practice, she performs, teaches and facilitates processes that bring embodied knowledge, critical reflection and collective imagination into dialogue. She graduated from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam.

Aleksas Jukumas

Aleksas Jukumas is an artist based in Vilnius whose practice has internalised itself into auditoriums with the ring of bone, becoming indistinguishable from everyday bustling going on inside them. It moves through the recurring frictions between mind and reality, when one overwrites the other, steals fragments from it, or when reality outdoes anything the imagination could conjure. Through walking, storytelling, text, participatory practices and interventions tuning into inner auditory aesthetics and listening for their footsteps trespassing into one another’s territory.

Saulė Noreikaitė

Saulė Noreikaitė is an artist working across visual art and contemporary dance, whose practice explores cultural and social understandings of the human body and its relationship to different environments. Working with performance, video, installation, sculpture and audience instructions, she examines how our relationships to the body are shaped by environmental and societal factors. Based in Lithuania, she also works as a curator, educator and performer. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, and an MA in Social Anthropology from Vytautas Magnus University.

Sjors Roeters

Sjors Roeters is a hybrid researcher and writer from the Netherlands, attempting to become an idiot. Not as metaphor, but as methodological necessity. He did not choose to be born in 1991, the same year a rock crumbled off a mountain somewhere, yet he ended up debuting in 2022 with his book Billionaires under the Guillotine (not a manual).

Along the way, though, a question began to fester: does rational critique consolidate power rather than subvert it? Perhaps it is precisely the idiot’s irrationality and opacity that yields more transformative potential. At Rupert AEP he may find himself researching the idiot through performance and video. Meaning has not found him yet.

Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė

Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė is a Vilnius-based artist and educator who works primarily with installation. Her practice brings together personal memories, family histories and political contexts, often creating spaces where different communities can meet. Drawing on autobiographical material and weaving it into fictional narratives, she explores how history and ideological heritage shape identities across the past, present and future. She holds an MA in Sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts.

Eglė Trimailovaitė

Eglė Trimailovaitė is an artist, cook and cultural worker whose practice centres on food, hospitality and bringing people together. Working through shared meals, tastings, cocktails, food workshops, temporary bars and textile interventions, she uses food as a medium for creating encounters and opening conversations. Her projects explore questions of care, belonging, ecology, cultural memory, accessibility and solidarity, often using seasonal, local and accessible ingredients. Alongside her artistic practice, she works in cultural production and education, DJs and co-hosts a morning show on Radio Vilnius.

Shawn Vieron

Shawn Vieron is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Canada, whose research investigates exhaustion as a material, psychological and infrastructural condition. Working across sculpture, installation, sound and image-based media, his practice examines how systems of labour, discipline and cultural reproduction become embedded within objects, environments and everyday experience. His recent work explores militarised infrastructures, competitive sports and the circulation of pirated media as sites where fatigue, memory and survival are continuously produced and negotiated. He received a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University in 2026.

Curators: JL Murtaugh (Liam) and Monika Lipšic
Coordinator: Gabrielė Golubovičiūtė
Communications: Kornelija Žvinklytė
Designers: Augustinas Milkus and Jana Sofie Liebe
Special thanks to: Viktorija Šiaulytė

Rupert’s 2026-27 Alternative Education Programme and the participation of its mentors are financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality, and Nordic Culture Point. Rupert’s partner is INVL Family Office.