We meet the artist in his hometown Vilnius in 2018, our host having made the
arrangements for what we think will be a studio visit. Augustas is coming over to
pick us up, which is a nice gesture. He then takes us for a short drive, parks the car
in an indistinctive street, presents a pair of rubber boots and tells us we can only go
one at a time. In turn, we put on the boots and are taken to the riverside, down its
slippery slope, and then gently ushered into the old sewerage pipe at the bottom.
Inside of what turns out to be his graduation work, a comfortable hammock offers
us a perfectly framed view on the flowing river. Augustas is there, waiting patiently
while we let things sink in.
Upon his first real encounter with the premises of P/////AKT, in the fall of 2019, it
immediately becomes clear that the adjacent building site is something to be
worked with. As is often the case in his practice, Augustas Serapinas likes to reflect
upon the surrounding context of the space he’s invited to do a project – the space
usually an art space, the context something other than that. The work to be done, as
it turned out, is the real deal. The work, as real as it is, is also a facsimile. To make
things a bit more complicated still: a facsimile of something that doesn’t exist, but at
some point will come into existence – but differently.
The privately owned lot next door from P/////AKT has been awaiting its new
destination since 2007. Work – the gentrification of this rare little fringe – has now
finally begun: a five-story building consisting of apartments and commercial/office
spaces on the ground floor should be finished by the spring of 2021. Van Wijnen,
the main contractor refers to it as 20 Apartments, or simply Zeeburgerpad 54. At the
moment they are building a two-layered parking garage below street level – in a way
the stage on which Serapinas has designed his proposal for P/////AKT and which is
mirroring the yet-to-be-built ground floor of the new building inside the exhibition
space. Leading up to the exhibition, P/////AKT has been negotiating with the owner
and contractor in order to obtain the necessary information and technical
drawings. P/////AKT also hired brick workers to execute the construction, not unlike
like a contractor hiring a subcontractor for a certain stage in the building process.
As we by now strongly believe, Serapinas considers the process of preparation and
production of the work leading up to its current state, to be a material, a part of the
final piece on view, which is an artistic production inside an exhibition space. At the
same time it is a living construction site. The distinction between the two is diffuse,
which means things are continuously oscillating between two realities and will keep
doing so throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Augustas Serapinas’ solo exhibition marks the second part of P/////AKT’s exhibition
programme The Space Conductors Are Among Us.
The Space Conductors Are Among Us
As a platform for contemporary art, P/////AKT aims to allow its artists to create their
own mental space inside its walls – an always changing environment for the visitors
to immerse themselves in. In 2020 the Space Conductors will kick o the three-year
program Hey! Where is My Mind? and shed their light on what P/////AKT might mean
as a space in itself; a crisis center for artists, an exhibition space reflecting its own
nature, a construction among other constructions and a place that is subject to
gentrification and geopolitical forces.
The participating artists are Stian Ådlandsvik (Oslo, NO), Augustas Serapinas
(Vilnius, LT), Stephan Blumenschein (Amsterdam, NL), Ieva Kraule-Kūna
and Elīna Vītola (Riga, LV, in collaboration with Kim? Contemporary Art Center) and
Anu Vahtra (Tallinn, EE).
Artist/writer Brenda Tempelaar (Schoonhoven, NL) will moderate an additional public
program consisting of texts and events throughout the year, departing from her
ongoing research into the social and physical space of art within contemporary life.
Courtesy of the artist and P/////AKT, Amsterdam
Photocredit Rob van de Werdt and Valeria Marchesini