April’s August. A Conversation with Ben Eastham and Monika Kalinauskaitė

On 19 August at 7 pm, April Writing Residency invites you to a conversation with writer, art critic and editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism Ben Eastham and writer, critic and curator Monika Kalinauskaitė. At LAA’s art and culture space Medūza, they will discuss the complexities of writing as means of policy making, poetics and navigation: through art, through contemporaneity, through shared, threatened, loved and lived realities. The Floating World – a forthcoming novel by Ben Eastham – described by poet Luke Kennard as ‘at times like the work of a J. G. Ballard for the 2020s, at others like the incarnation of Italo Calvino’ – will also be discussed as a point of intersection between criticism, literature, and the art world. 

BEN EASTHAM is the editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism, as well as an art critic and novelist. His second book of non-fiction, The Imaginary Museum, was published in 2020; his debut novel, The Floating World, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Astra House (in the US) in October 2026.

A regular contributor to The Guardian, his writing has also appeared in ArtReview, e-flux, Frieze, London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Fantastic Man, Acne Paper and the Financial Times, among other publications. Cofounder of literary magazine The White Review, with Jacques Testard, he was previously editor at ArtReview, a co-curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, publications editor of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and an associate editor at documenta 14. Now based in London, he lived for a number of years in Athens and Rome. 

MONIKA KALINAUSKAITĖ (Monika Kalin) is a writer and curator based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her texts bounce between the boundaries of art criticism, fiction and poetry, celebrating the fluidity of language and the emotional extremities hidden within simple concepts. Her work has been featured in literary magazines (Fireflies, PaperWork, The Happy Hypocrite 10: Tolstoevsky et al.), exhibitions and catalogues (most recently – the Sun & Sea (Marina) vinyl-catalogue for the Lithuanian National Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and Emilija Škarnulytė’s project Manifold at the 22nd International Triennale di Milano), as well as Lithuanian and international art media. As a curator, Kalinauskaitė worked with the JCDecaux Award exhibition series at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, in 2018–2019, as well as on independent projects by emerging artists. She currently works as a curator of exhibitions and collection displays at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, a department of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art.

APRIL is an international residency programme for everyone who writes: novelists and essayists, critics, editors and their magazines, performers and scriptwriters, artist-writers and, of course, poets, sometimes even ghostwriters. The residency welcomes both Lithuanian and international authors who use storytelling as a creative tool and are not afraid to experiment with text forms, language, or genre. April offers writers the chance to work within Trakai’s unique environment, delve deeper into the topics of their research and local context, familiarise themselves with the contemporary cultural scene in Lithuania and its established and emerging participants, and develop new work – whether a chapter of a forthcoming book, a translation of their own or someone else’s writing, poems or essays, performance scripts, diaristic notes, the perfect title, a magazine, or many things yet unthought. 

The April residency programme is partially funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. 
Event partner: Medūza

Event will be held in English.