Before beginning to work together Nomeda Kavaliauskaitė and Gediminas Urbonas worked separately and even participated in prestigious international exhibitions. While he was still studying sculpture, in 1988, with his contemporaries, Urbonas founded the first Lithuanian art actions and performances group “Green Leaf”, mostly known for its campaign The Road (1990) in front of Vilnius Town Hall. He also created space installations (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1996). One of his most impressive early sculptures is The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1990): the title, borrowed from Milan Kundera's novel, went well with a granite lump and a handle of an old suitcase attached to it. Today, the work looks like a prophetic sign of mass emigration.

Having graduated in graphics, Nomeda first mostly worked on staged photographs. One of her more interesting works (created with artist Elena Valiukaitė) is Two Together on the Periphery, a slightly homoerotic series of living tableaus (tableaux vivants) based on engravings found in a handbook for housekeeping and nursing published in Vienna in the late 19th century (photographer Gintautas Trimakas, 1994–1997).

In 1993 Urbonas, together with art critic Saulius Grigoravičius, established an independent contemporary art gallery “Jutempus TMP” (interdisciplinary art projects) and Nomeda was actively involved in its activities. In 1997 “Jutempus” lost its premises and moved into the Urbonas family apartment. Back then they not only worked together in project management and dissemination, but also started to create together. In their activities, the boundary between management and creativity has never been clear. Their first joint work was a series of broadcasts on Lithuanian National Radio and Television “tvvv.plotas” (tvvv.area, 1998) where various creative topics were discussed with other artists.

Transaction (2000), acquired by the Lithuanian National Gallery of Art, is their first major interdisciplinary collaborative project based on collaboration with other people and other professions which made them famous throughout Europe. Presented in Vilnius, Budapest, Stuttgart, Stockholm, as well as in the 2002 Kassel “documenta”, it seemed to be a different exhibition every time, since the same concept, i.e. a stage for debating and critiquing the patriarchal order and gender politics in Lithuania from the Soviet period to the present day, would each time acquire yet another architectural and audiovisual form.

For their study of gender stereotypes, the artists used the film archive of the Lithuanian Film Studios from the years 1947–1997 (their selection reflects well the role of the woman in the family and society), filmed interviews where women artists and scholars discussed feminism, as well as psychiatrists who were filmed watching and commenting on the films. Transactional analysis, a method employed in psychiatry, is based on a “drama triangle” involving the interchange of roles between victim, persecutor and rescuer. In Lithuanian culture, women always assume the role of the victim, although, as it turns out, that role is generally quite prevalent in Lithuanians at large, with deep historical roots. Their artificially created spaces for debates gave the participating women a chance to relive their experiences as victims under the supervision of an ominous institution of the psychiatrist.

In their sequel to Transaction, Ruta Remake (2002), the artists explore female identity and social roles that are constructed through an alienated, artificial, mediated voice. Inspired by the idea that the female voice does not exist and is undesirable in the patriarchal society, they try to find a voice capable of reproducing “authentic” femininity; however, in the project, these searches are overshadowed by the focus on attractive sound recording and playback technologies.

Pro-test Lab, a project launched in 2005, is a striking example of participatory art that obliterated the boundary between art and political activism. It started as a large-scale public movement for the preservation of Vilnius city public spaces after learning that “Lietuva” cinema theatre in Vilnius, privatized some time ago, would be destroyed. In a disused section of the cinema occupied by the ticket offices in Soviet times, the Urbonas duo set up a lab dedicated to creating, analysing and archiving various forms of protest. In the lab and on the square in front of the cinema, public gatherings, performances, film screenings, concerts, public discussions, TV broadcasts from other places, excursions, fashion shows, cooking parties and drawing workshops for children were being organized. Art actions also took place in other parts of the city: once, banners with inscription “Sold” were hanged on bridges, the Hill of Three Crosses and other objects.

Many volunteers got involved in the project, as well as people and public movements unhappy with the situation of public spaces: cultural workers and intellectuals, students and lecturers of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science, M. Romeris University, greens, anarchists, the new left. The latter group got so large that in 2008 they set up the organization “New Left 95”. During the project, the artists themselves set up a civic movement “For Lithuania without Quotation Marks”. Indirectly drawn into the project were the landowners (who began legal proceedings concerning losses due to delays), Vilnius city municipality (as the defendant) and Government of the Republic of Lithuania (that received a signed petition for the preservation of public spaces and public participation in deciding their fate). As an artwork by the Urbonas, the archived and compiled project material was later exhibited at various exhibitions, as well as at the Lithuanian Pavilion in the 2007 Venice Biennale.

In 2007 in Venice, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas presented the Villa Lituania project. This is how the building in the centre of Rome that housed the Lithuanian embassy between 1933 and 1940 is called. After occupying Lithuania, the Soviet Union occupied this building too, helped by the Italian authorities. Despite Lithuania's efforts to recover it, the Russian Consulate remains there. The axis of the Urbonas project was the planned peace pigeon race from Venice to Rome, to “Villa Lituania”. Unfortunately, during the opening of the bienniale, the birds provided by Lithuanian and Italian pigeon owners spread in all directions, as there was no possibility to raise them in a pigeon-house in the “Villa Lituania” garden. During the bienniale, talks took place about constructing pigeon-houses in Rome's public park and organizing a new race, but there is no reliable information about this or its impact on the Russian government. A sculptural model of a pigeon-house similar to the building of “Villa Lituania” was exhibited in the Lithuanian pavilion. The project also incorporated a filmed conversation with ambassador in exile Kazys Lozoraitis, a study of protest graffitis in Rome related to the occupation of Lithuania and correspondence with the Russian consulate in Rome and various Lithuanian and Italian institutions. The Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs informally evaluated the project as an extremely negligent interference in the field of international diplomacy.

Since 2009, the artists have been working in an art education programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and have been focusing on ecological topics.

Erika Grigoravičienė