Sometimes it seems that CONNECTION is a simple thing.

A person beside you. A glance. A conversation. A memory that suddenly returns so vividly, as if it had happened yesterday. A place where, upon entering, the body itself recognises where it is. A voice on the phone. A hand on the shoulder. An image that, for a moment, brings you back to a past instant.

Sometimes connection is felt through habits we do not even notice. Through inherited fears. Through language, with which we try to express what does not always yield to words. Through natural processes of which we are always a part, even when we choose to pretend that we are merely observers from the outside. Through technologies that bring us closer while, at the same time, taking away some essential element. Through such an all-encompassing closeness of another person that you no longer know where your own being ends and theirs begins.

This year, the IPMA Festival invites us to look closely at precisely these connections: the ones that emerge, endure, break apart, change direction, appear with great clarity, or sometimes remain barely perceptible.

As every year, in 2026 the IPMA exhibition brings together, in one space, works by artists from Lithuania and other countries around the world. Some speak of human closeness. Others address the vulnerability of the body, the entanglement of nature and culture, memory, cultural codes, and the dependencies created by technologies. At first glance, each work seems to be looking in a different direction. Towards a different experience. Towards a different point of sensitivity. What is especially interesting is each artist’s attempt to interpret connection, to understand it, to grasp it, to reveal it. And yet it is no less important to try to understand not only each work separately, but also the connection that arises between them: between images that unexpectedly echo one another; between themes that begin to complement or contradict each other; between tensions, resonances, and coincidences.

At the IPMA Festival, Connections becomes an open question: how do you experience and understand connections when you are in between? When you are connected. To a person. To an image. To a body. To a place. To what is alive, and to what we still call inanimate.

Svetlana Batura. Art Director and Curator of the IPMA Festival