JEN O’FARRELL
ONA JULIJA LUKAS STEPONAITYTĖ


13 SEPTEMBER - 18 OCTOBER 2025

on fragile systems

  • NEVEN is pleased to present On Fragile Systems, a two-person exhibition by Lithuanian artist Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė and British artist Jen O’Farrell, whose works examine how institutional, social, and ecological systems can embody shifting ideologies and vulnerabilities, revealing the subtle ways in which time, memory, and environment leave their mark. 

    Steponaitytė presents two photographs from her series Dew, which documents the refurbishment of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius. The project takes its title from the dew point, a metric of humidity which indicates the precise conditions in which water vapour in the air will condense into liquid water on surfaces, widely used in archival conservation and collections environments. For Steponaitytė, this fragile threshold becomes a metaphor for the instability of systems designed to protect and preserve, where even minor shifts in conditions can lead to irreversible change. 

    The library’s history speaks to the contradictions of preservation, constructed in the 1970s under Soviet rule as part of a network of state institutions tasked with managing knowledge and ideology. Once intended to project permanence, order, and the authority of the Soviet cultural system, the library’s material fragility soon surfaced:  the clay bricks became porous, water seeped in, and the roof began to leak. In the 1990s, following Lithuania’s independence, the rental of the basement to Men’s Factory, one of Lithuania’s first gay clubs, funded the library’s first computers, and, in 2016, the building began to be modernised to meet European Union archival standards. Its façade was reconstructed to replicate the original design, while its interior was gutted and rebuilt. This curious intersection of uses — knowledge archive, queer space, modernisation project — further marks the library as a repository of memory and ideology, its material form both a bearer of continuity/conservation and a site of rupture. The decision to preserve the exterior as a simulacrum of the original, while reengineering the internal systems, encapsulates a broader ideological negotiation between Soviet legacy and modernist aspiration. Architecture functions as an ambassador: renovation is not simply technical renewal but an act of cultural power, shaping which histories are preserved and which are rewritten, or erased.

    The two photographs encapsulate these tensions between preservation and omission, between permanence and decay. One captures a moment just before the building’s demolition, a sea of shelves dismantled, their contents relocated to temporary storage, awaiting a new home and context. The other shows the library’s main hall, site of the leaky ceiling, where marble sculptures are wrapped in plastic, and the carpet is torn up. The building stands as a fragile system of memory. The illusion of stability is revealed as an ongoing negotiation, one that reflects not only the vulnerabilities of material structures but also the shifting cultural and political systems they sustain. Much of what cultural heritage protects is not a fixed object but an idea.

    O’Farrell, in turn, presents three works extending her exploration of how ecological and urban systems intersect. Where Steponaitytė examines the library as an institutional structure caught between preservation and demolition, O’Farrell looks to the very materials and processes that make and demarcate transient environments: mud, sand, salt, resin, construction boards, pigments, plexiglass, spray paint, cable ties, and sheeting, are trapped and layered using painting techniques, and then subjected to the temporal material shifts and transformations of oxidation, abrasion, and erosion. The final abstractions evoke at once city infrastructures, topographic strata, and natural terrains. Matrix encapsulates these contradictory visual cues, recalling both volcanic fumarole and the glittering quality of a stretch of tarmac road. 


    Two wall-based sculptural works, Exhaust and Drift, draw specifically on research into coastlines and aeolian processes, the formation of dunes, the continuous shift of landscapes under the pressure of wind and erosion. These natural systems are both contrasted and likened by O’Farrell to the linear drive of urban expansion: road markings, construction meshes and graffiti as indexes of marking, bypassing, and excavating land. The works exist in a state of drift between development and disintegration, revealing how both ecological and urban systems are provisional and contingent. Yet, in O’Farrell’s constructions, fragility is not collapse but an active condition: a tactile, temporal system through which both landscapes and bodies endure and evolve. While Steponaitytė’s photographs reveal the ideological stakes of renovation, O’Farrell’s works embody transformation as a material condition. Surfaces carry traces of process — wetted, scratched, abraded, repeated — evoking both ecological time and bodily intimacy. The works linger in the tension between resilience and collapse, suggesting that systems, whether natural or human-made, endure not through stability but through ongoing negotiation with their environments.

    Across photography and materiality, both artists interrogate how systems — whether institutional, ecological, or architectural — embody shifting ideologies and vulnerabilities. Steponaitytė traces the transformation of a Soviet-era library into a European-standard archive, revealing how buildings act as cultural ambassadors: their renovations not just technical fixes but political gestures, rewriting what is remembered and what is concealed. O’Farrell engages materials drawn from construction, erosion and transformation, situating her works within ecological and urban processes that likewise reveal the pressures of power, development, and adaptation.

  • JEN O’FARRELL (b. Liverpool, 1990) makes abstract works that formally evoke the topographies of industrial inner-city landscapes, remote terrains and geological formations, using materials sourced directly from both urban and natural sites. O’Farrell presented her solo show No Longer Endless at NEVEN, London (2023) and was included in group exhibitions at Niru Ratnam, London (2025); The Artist Room, London (2024); and The South London Gallery, London (2020), amongst others. Residencies include La Wayaka Current, Atacama Desert, Chile, and Conditions, London. She lives and works in London.

    ONA JULIJA LUKAS STEPONAITYTĖ (b. Vilnius, 1992) is an artist working with photography and film. Her work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at Reethaus, Berlin Art Week (2024); Medūza, Vilnius (2024); and Inter.pblc, Copenhagen (2024) with Ssi Saarinen and Iida Jonsson. Group exhibitions include Moving Bodies, Moving Images, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022) and The Milk of Dreams, Arsenale, La Biennale di Venezia 59th, Venice (2022) with ​​Eglė Budvytytė and Marija Olšauskaitė; and Liste Art Fair, Basel (2020). She is featured in Contemporary Lithuanian Photography (eds. G. Kinčinaitytė and P. Petraitis, 2024), and her work is part of the MO Museum collection. In 2023, she received Kunsthall Charlottenborg’s Deep Forest Land Art prize. She is a PhD candidate at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and currently on residency in Finland as part of the Helsinki International Artist Programme. She lives and works in Vilnius.