Augustas Serapinas (b. 1990, Vilnius, Lithuania) lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. He studied Fine Art and Sculpture at Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius, Lithuania. Reimagining and restaging spaces complicates and problematises the assumptions that circumscribe them – not only in the context of the art institution but also in respect to the more general systematic infrastructures that bind them. Such considerations constitute the fundamental tenets of Serapinas’ practice. On the one hand, recomposing spaces as saturated and self-referential portraits of the art institution’s inner workings questions the order, organisation and agenda of conventional displays of art. Frequently, the museum itself is put on display in a gesture that embroils the institution’s naturalised function and exposes it as an enigmatic structure that belies its white-walled transparency.
Inverting the customary functions of architectural structures allows Serapinas to restage physical expanses in a way that troubles the hierarchical systems by which we confer meaning upon them. Granting the public access to such reinvented and manipulated caveats affects not only social commentary or an account of institutional norms but also articulates a complex site for the reformulation of subjectivity itself. In excavating obscure spaces, Serapinas repositions us in our relationality to the spaces we inhabit. Our naturalised perceptions and expectations of architectural structure and space are uprooted by this new positionality, allowing the artist to orchestrate these spaces as pockets of subjectivity that question not only how we orient ourselves within and towards them but also how this engenders or stops up social interactions. Interested in the relational and non-material practices of the early 1990s, Serapinas interrogates spatiality as a means of exploring the notion of the encounter – as an opportunity, act or phenomenon – and its implications for processes of identity formation.
Portrait: Photo by Algirdas Bakas
