Indre Serpytyte’s series Former NKVD–MVD–MGB–KGB Buildings examines the material and psychological remains of Soviet repression in Lithuania through photography and sculpture. The works portray sites once used by Soviet security agencies for surveillance, interrogation, and imprisonment—ordinary houses that were made into instruments of control. Under Soviet law, institutions such as the KGB could freely define “anti-state activity,” allowing the arbitrary detention and torture of civilians. Domestic dwellings across towns and villages became silent witnesses to these hidden operations.
Serpytyte began her project by researching and locating these former interrogation houses. Rather than entering them, she photographed their exteriors in situ, presenting them with a restrained and questioning gaze. Each image reveals a façade that conceals a complex and violent history, inviting viewers to reflect on absence, memory, and the architecture of power.
The exhibition consists of nine notebooks containing documentary photographs, over 300 hand-carved wooden model houses, and 24 black-and-white still-life photographs showing the sculptural forms. The wooden models—crafted from her photographs—stand as minimal, ghostly reconstructions of the original buildings. Displayed in ordered rows, they evoke both an archive and a cemetery of memory.
The repetition of forms, the systematic arrangement of photographs, and the monochrome palette create a rhythm of observation and reflection. Serpytyte turns architectural evidence into poetic testimony, exploring how visual representation can both record and reinterpret history. Her work asks viewers to confront the lingering traces of state control and to consider how trauma, surveillance, and silence persist within everyday spaces.
Indre Serpytyte is a Lithuanian artist based in London whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. Her work explores war, trauma, and political oppression, investigating how violence and ideology are embedded in architecture and everyday objects, transforming photos, archives, and reconstructed buildings into poetic visual forms that navigate documentation, imagination, visibility, and absence.
Her series “Former NKVD–MVD–MGB–KGB Buildings” investigates sites of Soviet repression in Lithuania, producing haunting photographs and hand-carved wooden models that question how history is recorded and remembered. Indre has exhibited internationally at Tate Modern, MoMA, The Photographers’ Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, and Museum Folkwang.
