In September, Rupert launches the fourteenth edition of the Alternative Education Programme (AEP). The programme runs for six months, through the final events in February 2027.

The AEP is a transdisciplinary para-academic programme for international creative practitioners from different fields, supporting the development of artistic practices, research and ideas through individual mentorship, collective learning and experimentation.

Rupert was founded around its alternative education programme, and this year the AEP returns to its original principles. The design of the course emphasises continuous personal mentorship, tailored to each participant’s practice, to guide the focused development of their project proposals leading up to their public presentation in February.

A core faculty will lead and collaborate with the participants in one-on-one mentorship sessions, peer criticism, creative workshops, lectures, discussions, visits and other collective activities, with opportunities to connect to the Lithuanian art ecosystem and Rupert’s wider programme. Throughout the programme, the AEP faculty, guest tutors, and the Rupert team will support their projects and creative development.

This year, the alternative education programme cohort includes nine practitioners working across installation, performance, dance, architecture, writing, sound, food, choreography and participatory practices, exploring themes including bodies, memory, sleep, hospitality, collective experience, labour and knowledge-making.

The 2026-27 AEP participants are Magdalena Beliavska, Inga Galinytė, Laima Jaunzema, Aleksas Jukumas, Saulė Noreikaitė, Sjors Roeters, Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė, Eglė Trimailovaitė and Shawn Vieron.

The 2026-27 AEP faculty includes Post Brothers, George Finlay Ramsay and Angeliki Tzortzakaki, as well as Rupert team members Monika Lipšic, JL Murtaugh and Viktorija Šiaulytė. In addition to the workshops and personal mentorship sessions offered by the AEP faculty, additional tutors and mentors will be added according to the participants’ creative goals. These tutors and mentors will be announced in the coming weeks.

PARTICIPANTS

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, 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 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 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 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 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 is a researcher and writer from the Netherlands whose work explores the relationship between rational critique, power and transformation. He is interested in whether rational critique can challenge existing power structures or whether it may instead reinforce them. His work turns to the figure of the idiot, understood not as a metaphor but as a possible methodological necessity, and considers whether irrationality and opacity might offer other ways of thinking and working. In 2022, he published his first book, Billionaires under the Guillotine (not a manual). At Rupert AEP, he plans to continue his research into the idiot through performance and video. 

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  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 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. 

FACULTY

Post Brothers
Faculty Member

Post Brothers is a critical enterprise that includes Matthew Post, an enthusiast, word processor, educator, and (co)dependent curator engaged in artist-oriented projects and critical fabulations. From 2016–2019, Post Brothers was curator at Kunstverein München, Munich, and from 2021–2023 was an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. They have curated exhibitions and projects internationally and regularly publish essays in artist publications, exhibition catalogues, and art and cultural journals. Recent curated exhibitions include João Maria Gusmão: Following The White Tiger at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2026); Breaking the Joints at Sapieha Palace, Vilnius (2025); Drain the Öresund at Malmö Konsthall (2025); and In the beginning was the deed! at Galeria Arsenał in Białystok (2021). They also participate in exhibitions with text-based and performative contributions and lecture in art and educational contexts across Europe. Post Brothers holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2009), and a BFA from Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver (2006).

Monika Lipšic
Curator of the Residency and Public Programmes

Monika Lipšic is a curator and artist based in Vilnius. She graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts in Art History and Curatorial Studies and later worked at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius. She works independently on exhibitions, performances, and other projects in Lithuania and abroad.Since 2020, she has been a co-founder and co-curator of Videograms, a festival for artists’ film and moving image. 

JL Murtaugh (Liam)
Curator of the Residency and Public Programmes

JL Murtaugh is an artist, curator, writer, and consultant based in Vilnius. Originally from Chicago, he has organised projects under the alias Syndicate since 2014. He was artistic director of Autarkia, Vilnius (2020–2023), and previously directed Tenderpixel, London (2012–2014). He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, and a BFA in Fine Art and Art History from Columbia College, Chicago.

George Finlay Ramsay
Faculty Member

George Finlay Ramsay is an artist from Scotland working across film, performance, poetry, music, and installation. In recent years, he has been collaborating with volcanoes, interviewing them and bringing books of people’s regrets to burn in their mouths. His work has been presented at Generator Projects, Mubi, NTS, Art Basel, Matadero, L’Orto Botanico di Roma, Tutto Questo Sentire, Rupert, Camden Arts Centre, and BBC Late Junction Festival. His practice has been funded by Oxford University, Arts Council England, and Sound & Music.

Viktorija Šiaulytė
Director

Viktorija Šiaulytė is an independent curator and producer working across contemporary art, architecture, and film. She holds an MFA in Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice from Konstfack and a BA in Art History from Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is currently a research affiliate at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology and has presented projects internationally. Since 2020, she has co-founded and co-curated Videograms, a festival for artists’ film and moving image in Vilnius.

Angeliki Tzortzakaki
Faculty Member

Angeliki Tzortzakaki is a Cretan-born writer, curator, and educator based in Amsterdam. Since 2023, she has been collaborating with Sonic Acts Biennial as an exhibitions curator. She has (co-)curated solo exhibitions by AnnaMaria Pinaka at ROZENSTRAAT (2025) and Yorgia Karidi at the Theocharakis Foundation (2024). Focusing on performative practices, she has also co-organised Touching Faultlines (2024), contributed to A Rave Down Below as part of the 2023 Eleusis European Capital of Culture, and co-organised the performance series carried by invisible bodies (2022).

In 2021, she was a Curatorial Fellow at ARTWORKS (Stavros Niarchos Foundation) and previously participated in the nomadic fellowship A Natural Oasis? (2018–2020). Her collaborative and performative practice has been presented and published internationally. She advises art organisations and teaches at art academies including the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, St. Joost School of Art & Design, and KABK. 

TIMELINE

The 2026-27 Alternative Education Programme will run from mid-September through the final events in February. Throughout the programme, tutors and faculty will lead workshops and mentorship sessions exclusively with participants, but many will also hold public lectures or events at Rupert that everyone may attend during their stay in Vilnius. Additional visiting tutors and the dates of the public events will be announced shortly.

• 14 September – First gathering and welcome event at Rupert
• 15–17 September – Faculty portfolio reviews and feedback sessions at Kintai Arts
• 24–25 September – JL Murtaugh 
• 29–1 October – Tris Vonna-Michell, TBC
• 30 September–2 October – Post Brothers
• 14–16 October – George Finlay Ramsay
• 28–30 October – Angeliki Tzortzakaki
• 4–6 November – Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze
• December – Lina Lapelytė, TBC
• February 2027 – Final presentations

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.

Photos by Andrej Vasilenko. Moments from the 2025 AEP final event.