Arts at CERN

Emilija Škarnulytė is the recipient of Collide Stockholm, the Arts at CERN international residency award organised in collaboration with the Nobel Prize Museum

Following the international open call launched in November 2025, Arts at CERN and the Nobel Prize Museum are pleased to announce that Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulytė has been selected as the recipient of the Collide Stockholm residency award. The jury also decided to award two Honorary Mentions to artists Morehshin Allahyari and Wendi Yan.

Collide is Arts at CERN’s flagship residency programme. Each edition is organised in partnership with a leading cultural institution in one of the CERN Member States. Inaugurated in 2025, Collide Stockholm is a two-month international art residency initiated by CERN and the Nobel Prize Museum, which invites artists to reflect on the cultural and societal impact of fundamental science and advanced technologies. The open call attracted a total of 908 applications from artists in 89 countries.

In autumn 2026, Škarnulytė will spend one month at CERN followed by one month at the Nobel Prize Museum to develop a new artwork with the support of the curatorial teams of both institutions.

At CERN, she will begin her project Memory of the Unseen. Her practice is rooted in the exploration of infrastructures that mediate between the visible and the invisible, the human and the post-human, the present and deep time. In dialogue with scientists at CERN, she will engage with event reconstruction, decay signatures, detector sensitivity and the temporal behaviour of experimental data, focusing on what she describes as “thresholds”.

Blending 3D scans, speculative visual sequences and atmospheric sound, she will explore “fragile spaces where the invisible becomes briefly perceptible”: environments such as detector caverns, tunnels, magnetic infrastructures and data-processing systems that enable the detection of particle interactions.

At the Nobel Prize Museum, she will investigate the institution as a site where narratives of scientific discovery enter the cultural sphere and collective memory, through research into archival materials, exhibition strategies and historical narratives.

Chaired by Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN, the jury was composed of Clara Åhlvik, Director of Exhibitions at the Nobel Prize Museum; Daniel Birnbaum, art curator and Professor of Philosophy at the Städelschule in Frankfurt; Ulf Danielsson, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physics; and Helga Timko, an accelerator physicist at CERN and a member of the CERN Cultural Board.In recognition of the outstanding quality of the proposals, the jury decided to award two Honorary Mentions to the artists Morehshin Allahyari and Wendi Yan.

Morehshin Allahyari’s project, which reconfigures computational machines by drawing on automata from the Islamic Golden Era, revisits histories of technological innovation and mechanical intelligence with imaginative potential and aesthetic vision.

Wendi Yan engages with transcultural narratives in science and technology and with the possibilities of worldbuilding and gaming as poetic tools for historical inquiry and knowledge making. Her transdisciplinary project bridges scholarly depth with current techno-scientific discourses through emerging digital aesthetics.

“Arts at CERN was delighted by the extraordinary number and breadth of the proposals” said Giulia Bini, Head of Arts at CERN. “We look forward to welcoming Emilija Škarnulytė to CERN and to developing this new edition of Collide with the Nobel Prize Museum with a view to providing a fertile ground to reflect on our respective quests for knowledge by fostering artistic visions as a means of inquiry. We express our sincere gratitude to all the artists who applied for this programme.”

“The jury deliberation session at the Nobel Prize Museum was an inspiring gathering that generated rich discussions, confirming the remarkable potential of this new collaboration with Arts at CERN. We congratulate the awardees and look forward to accompanying Emilija Škarnulytė in her exploration of our museum, its history and the stories it preserves,” said Clara Åhlvik, Director of Exhibition at the Nobel Prize Museum.