Monument for Utopia combines personal stories of three friends of different nationalities, who met during their military service in Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East in 1988–90. At that time they shared similar aesthetic interests and dreamt becoming artists. Later, they went on with their lives and their communication went apart.

Vyacheslav studied at the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and became a sculptor in the tradition of the Russian academic realism (in 2018 he emigrated to Italy with his family). S. emigrated from Latvia to Dublin, immersed himself in gay scene and was for eight years stealing books from various bookstores in the city, at the same time obsessively spending his savings on lottery tickets. Žiüra graduated from Vilnius Art Academy and was continuously working within the framework of contemporary art.

Eventually he proposed that Vyacheslav should commemorate the anniversary of their friendship with a sculpture, leaving him the freedom of interpretation. The work consists of the sculpture envisioning three friends, standing on a symbolic globe, facing different directions, surrounded by a collection of over two tons of stolen books. It is accompanied by a video documenting the journey to St. Petersburg and the process of creation of the sculpture.

Monument for Utopia was staged at the main venue of the 2015 Kaunas Biennial, “Threads: A Fantasmagoria about Distance” (curated by Nicolas Bourriaud) and in Žiüra’s solo exhibition “Portraits” at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius in 2022–23 (curated by Anders Kreuger).