Curator: Anders Kreuger On-site painting installation at the CAC, Vilnius, Lithuania The floor-based, mixed-media painting installation Migratory Neurogenesis (2001) was produced on-site at the CAC, specially for Self-Esteem. The title, suggested by New York writer Thomas Mediodia, is an oblique reference to a much-disputed issue of contemporary biological and behavioural science. Is it possible (as some researchers now claim after studying songbirds, mice and apes) for the adult individual to re-generate neurons (brain-cells)? Or is it still wisest to stick to the earlier scientific consensus - that the production of new neurons ends in early childhood, and the the individual therefore must learn to reprogramme remaining cells as others constantly die away. It is argued, notably by the songbird expert Professor Fernando Nottebohm at Rockefeller University in New York, that neurons are replaced in the adult brain in response to new challenges in the environment, such as seasonal migration. It has also been demonstrated, by Professor Elizabeth Gould at Princeton University and others, that newly created brain-cells can migrate from one part of the brain to function in another. Inspired by this ongoing debate in natural science - and by its implications for thinking about issues like human migration and cultural belonging - Ieva Martinaityté-Mediodia has created an associative field, an assembly of disparate visual elements held together by a shrill green note that was rarely before sounded in Lithuanian painting. Anders Kreuger