INTRO:
INTRO - art centre established by Vegas Šimbelis in Vilnius, Lithuania, that combined a club, café, website and art galleries to create a single platform. Its mission was to showcase contemporary art and music to the city’s residents and visitors within a shared space.
As a non-institutional arts centre, INTRO prioritised openness and exchange, encouraging artists to work independently within a model of an artist-run arts space, based on personal experience and artistic expression. It hosted multidisciplinary projects that transcended the boundaries of traditional artistic practice and research. Its activities were guided by principles of free and ethical practice, rooted in the operational codes of conceptual and contemporary art.
This commitment to openness cultivated freer modes of thinking and expanded the range of possibilities, based on collaboration and process. INTRO became a platform for young, established and well-known artists alike, often deliberately mixing them to flatten hierarchical structures within the cultural field.
The INTRO club hosted internationally renowned musicians and bands, including No Means No, Against Me!, Ba Cissoko, Subway and Los Fastidios, to name a few. It also featured renowned DJs and producers, including Chris Clark, Animals on Wheels, Battery Operated, Daniel Bell and Paco Osuna, as well as prominent Lithuanian musicians and artists.
INTRO operated successfully between 2003 and 2007. Its activities unfolded across a gallery, music club, bar and online platform, occupying a total area of 1,000 square metres. Located in the heart of Vilnius Old Town at Maironio g. 3, next to St Anne's Church, INTRO collaborated with the Vilnius Academy of Art.
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“INTRO was never meant to become an institution - it was a condition. We created a space where art could happen without permission, where music, images, and ideas collided in real time. It was raw, unstable, and alive. INTRO was about trust in the artist and trust in the process - about building a platform before we even knew what would stand on it.” — Founder and director Vegas Šimbelis.
At the beginning of the 21st century, while Lithuania was reassembling its cultural identity, INTRO surfaced as a concentrated field of convergence—where disciplines, bodies, and freedoms collided. From 2001 to 2008, inside the former Pravda (Lith. Tiesa) printing house in Vilnius, INTRO functioned less as an institution than as a living circuitry of exchange. It was a site of friction and formation that recalibrated how contemporary art in Lithuania was born, made, encountered, and collectively inhabited.
As the country’s first independent art center, INTRO operated with innovative, interdisciplinary and radical permeability. Exhibitions intertwined with concerts, screenings, performances, fashion events, festivals, publications, and workshops. Art galleries, studios, and a music club fused into a single hybrid organism that dissolved boundaries between media and publics. INTRO became an epicenter of circulation - visual artists, young and established, and international creators into a shared, unstable present where local impulses met global flows and a new artistic generation took shape.
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INTRO Archive
This project revisits INTRO not as nostalgia, but as a formative phenomenon. Through archival materials, films, personal narratives, and artistic works, the exhibition reconstructs a multi-layered portrait of a time when new artistic identities were forged. INTRO is revealed here as a catalyst—one that profoundly influenced the development of contemporary art in Lithuania and helped shape the creative values of a generation whose impact continues to resonate today.
INTRO Archive exhibited at Rave Nation exhibition, National Museum.
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external link: INTRO.LT
