S&P Stanikas: Family, Sex, and Politics in Post-Soviet Art

Lithuanian artist duo Svai and Paul Stanikas, born 1961 and 1962 in Vilnius, create hybrid works blending sculpture, drawing, painting, video, and photography that confront family, sexuality, and political history. Trained at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts during the Soviet era, they later developed their language after the fall of the Berlin Wall, rejecting Western spectacle for a style rooted in their origins. Their work includes realistic clay sculptures of aging faces and genitalia, drawings, and photographic series such as "La communiste (Paris) et les diables" (2001), which juxtaposes a 1960s communist woman archetype with male genital close-ups. The video "Inferno" (2004) features Paul Stanikas dancing among busts by his grandfather, a pre-war sculptor of Lenin statues, and includes archival images from the Ponary forest massacre of 40,000 Jews. Their 2003 Venice Biennale Lithuanian pavilion show produced the catalog "World War," and their 2005 White Box, New York exhibition yielded "End of Millenium." The couple lives between Paris, London, and Vilnius. Their work explores the tension between family and sex, using generational cross-dressing to highlight violence inherent in both, and critiques the Soviet family model while engaging with historical trauma.