The UK-based Lithuanian artist Indrė Šerpytytė has noticed that memorial sites honouring the partisan war against the Soviet occupation are disappearing in Lithuania. While visiting towns, she found houses that had been appropriated from residents by repressive organisations - NKVD, MVD, MGB and KGB - and used thereafter as facilities for the imprisonment, interrogation and torture of suspects. After the resistance movement was suppressed, the houses were repurposed to serve as libraries, schools, hospices and residencies; daily life gradually absorbed the signs of past trauma. Scale models of these houses, carved on commission by the artist, turn into awkward souvenirs, which contain the terror, betrayals and losses, of those times.

We remember the 1940s and early 1950s as a period of great upheaval: Lithuania is occupied, information gives way to propaganda, individuals hostile to the Soviets are imprisoned, deported or killed; the army of Nazi Germany marches into the territory of Lithuania, Soviet sympathisers retreat to Russia - leaving graves from mass killings - newspapers are filled with Nazi propaganda, citizens are recruited to work for the Reich, the Holocaust begins; the Soviet army expels the Nazis and stays. Partisans, having withdrawn to the forests, put up resistance, a great many Lithuanians emigrate - a new wave of arrests, tortures, incarcerations, executions and deportations. Meanwhile, painters, printmakers, sculptors and photographers were conscripted to visualise the 'truth' as propaganda for both systems in paintings, monuments, caricatures and photo reportage.

Yet, they also captured historical events. Judelis Kacenbergas, Chanonas Levinas and Michailas Rebis photographed the route of the 16th Lithuanian Division of the Soviet Army. Povilas Karpavičius followed the retreating Nazi army, documenting the trail of devastation in its wake. Printmaker Stepas Žukas drew images of the daily life of intellectuals, who had retreated to Russia, and created caricatures castigating Nazi cruelties. It took more time for the painters. During the war, they represented peaceful life, hardly touched by war and occupation and upon its end they illustrated books of classic Lithuanian literature in the interwar manner. Only ten years later did Irena Trečiokaitė-Žebenkienė paint the first event with which war narratives usually begin - the bombing of a Youth Pioneer camp in Palanga. Also, Marija Račkauskaitė-Cvirkienė and Neemiya Arbit Blatas represented the dramatic moment of an execution. Much later, Igoris Piekuras would visualise the war as frames of frozen memories.

Official art stayed away from topics inconsistent with the narrative of 'the victory of socialism': the Holocaust, emigration, deportation, partisan resistance and terror. It was not until the late Soviet period, when Lithuania's liberation gradually began, that these issues were addressed. Kęstutis Grigaliūnas created the "Jurgeliškės" series, in which glaringly cheerful colours stand in contrast to a narrative about the forced labour of the deportees and Stalin's sun brought to the country by force. The photographer Juozas Kazlauskas followed an expedition to Siberia in search of the deportees' remains and the UK-based artist Elena Gaputytė created a memorial to the victims of Trofimovsk.

Artists' works covering a wide range of ideologies, historical events, countries and changing  communities, mark the void separating them as a metaphor for loss.