Vinted transformed second-hand fashion — now its creator has his eye on the art world
Justas Janauskas’s new art foundation connects curators in the Baltic states and the UK
Second-hand fashion and curatorial fellowships are not obvious bedfellows, but for Justas Janauskas, co-founder of the marketplace Vinted, now is the time to upcycle his business’s success into the contemporary art world.
Together with curator and art historian Adomas Narkevičius, he is launching a reciprocal fellowship programme between institutions in the Baltic states and their international peers. The first round of their 18-month project opens next week to early-career curators from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia who can apply for a post at London’s Hayward Gallery, while those from the UK can pitch to work in Estonia’s leading contemporary art space, the Tallinn Art Hall.
Janauskas, a Lithuania-born software engineer, says he sold his first product aged only 14, an accountancy solution that he created for his mother’s employers. After a chance meeting with Milda Mitkuté at a housewarming in 2008, they launched Vinted, initially as a platform for local women to swap clothes. The business later became Lithuania’s first tech “unicorn” (a start-up valued above $1bn). Today its worth has been put at around $9bn.
The art world proved a lifeline to Janauskas when he stepped back as chief executive in 2017. “Basically I was jobless, for the first time since I was about 10. It was a big shock, my identity was my business . . . I felt I had no role,” he says. He found himself “in depression for a couple of years”, though he had an entry into the creative fields via his wife, the writer and multidisciplinary artist Gabija Grušaitė. With her, “I went to events and met people,” he says.
At the same time, he was developing a new digital business, HumansApp, which took the mode of a dating app but for non-romantic friendships. This did not take off, but Janauskas says it made him realise that “the art world was an existing platform to connect humans, through intellectual topics and events.”
He started to support art in what he describes as a scattergun way. Then, with more and more requests for his backing, he realised that “I needed a structure, with a clear mission, just like Vinted.”
So, this year, Upė Foundation was born. Pronounced “oo-pe”, the name means “river” in Lithuanian and Latvian and was chosen to conjure up the flow of ideas. Its broad mission is “to initiate new, risk-taking Baltic and global exchanges in contemporary art”, Janauskas says.
Narkevičius has joined as his business partner — they inevitably met at a party last year — and emphasises the potential of human connection. “I saw the long-term snowball effect when I was working in Rupert [Center for Art, an institution for residencies and education in Vilnius],” he says. “Something that starts as a discussion in a bar or café, maybe five to seven years later, can become a show in an important museum.” This is the thinking behind the 18-month timeframe for their reciprocal residencies — “there’s time to build long-lasting bonds,” Janauskas says.
Like many of today’s younger patrons — Janauskas is 41; Narkevičius is 32 — they see greater relative value in providing such a platform. “I personally prefer experiences to objects,” Janauskas says. “I think you can really do more by organising, for example, fellowship programmes, and it’s more exciting.”
Their focus on the Baltic regions partly reflects their Lithuanian nationalities, while London, where the foundation is based, also has a personal connection — Narkevičius is based there, having previously worked in the city’s Cell Project Space, while Janauskas is a frequent visitor to the UK.
Narkevičius notes the rise of an experimental contemporary art scene in the Baltic states since their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. “What’s so exciting about this period is that it created a generation of artists and cultural practitioners whose formative years were between state communism and capitalist entrenchment. The old structures collapsed, new structures weren’t built yet and it produced unanticipated ground for experimentation,” he says.
Art from the region came to international attention through the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019, when an edgy opera, set on a beach, won the Golden Lion award for best pavilion (Sun & Sea (Marina), by Lina Lapelytė, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė and Vaiva Grainytė).
Other superstar Lithuanian artists now on the contemporary scene include Emilija Škarnulytė, who has a solo show of films and immersive installations opening at Tate St Ives this week, while the Vilnius-born Augustas Serapinas was the talk of Art Basel when he created a gym-based performance for its Unlimited section in 2023. Meanwhile, Narkevičius is co-curating the Latvian pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale based on a radical fashion and art event (Untamed Fashion Assembly) held several times in Riga through the 1990s.
Narkevičius is full of praise for the ethical and practical structures that underpin the UK’s cultural scene, but thinks too that “perhaps UK institutions, where health and safety trumps all, can learn from a little bit of irreverence.”
The average cost of each Upė Foundation’s fellowship programme is £35,000 per year, which varies depending on the institution, role and location, and its first project comes at a time when UK institutions could do with the boost. Yung Ma, senior curator at the Hayward Gallery, says that “public funding has been cut, as we all know, and inflation is also putting pressure on institutions.” He says the Baltic partnership “will help us to open up different perspectives in our international programme and engage with new artists and networks while imparting some of our institutional knowledge.” Plus, he says, “I am sure I will learn from [the chosen fellow] too.”
True to his entrepreneurial roots, Janauskas describes these first fellowships as Upė’s “MVP”, an investment term that stands for minimum viable product, a basis for future development. There are already plans for a second UK-Baltic exchange, with the Camden Art Centre in north London, while Upė will fund a party for the Baltic state pavilions in Venice next year. Janauskas says that, in future, “we want to go beyond the quite standard west-east [exchanges] and also have east-east conversations, maybe also go across regions that don’t seem to make immediate sense geographically, but can produce personal, artistic and curatorial conversations.” Exchange is as much the key as it was for Vinted. “It is always a two-way street,” he says.