Opening a new museum is a Sisyphean task: finding a suitable location, acquiring the ultimate collection, finding it all — seems impossible to pull it off without the state funding. That is precisely what Viktoras & Danguolė Butkai did after selling their lucrative biochemistry business to an American giant. They’ve carefully collected best modern Lithuanian art, amazing 5000 pieces, self-financed a building (constructed by Studio Libeskind) and launched it in October 2018 to the public. MO is a modern art museum, featuring many other amenities: a library, a shop, a cinema, theatre, a conference hall, a bistro. By giving this fantastic gift to the city of Vilnius, Mr. Butkus had only one rule — after they paid everything, and the museum is open, MO has to start financing itself from the launch date. So the path for communicating about the museum was clear: we can’t afford to be elitist, cold, uninviting. MO has become what most of the local museums didn’t need to: a welcoming place despite one’s understanding of art.

Communicating about the museum is a complex task, and we’ve taken it to step by step. This particular campaign is concerned with presenting the museum’s local collections. Local is unknown, therefore uninteresting for most of the people, there are no apparent masterpieces, no magnolias. So our task was to a) show the actual art, b) show how art talks about back to us and tells a myriad of stories. We’ve chosen to tell a story of how the world happened and MO’s part in it. It is illustrated with more than 60 art pieces. As if to say: each visitor can surely find something to relate to in Lithuanian modern art, and that local art has the power to speak about universal topics.

The video was premiered online and at a museum’s launch press conference. And whenever skeptical journalists burst into applause, we knew, it was not only us who were happy with the result.