20 Apartments
18 June – 26 July 2020
P/////AKT
Zeeburgerpad 53 - Amsterdam
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.
Augustas Serapinas (b. 1990 in Vilnius,
Lithuania) lives and works in Vilnius. He completed his BFA at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
Exhibitions include May You Live In
Interesting Times, 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia (Venice, IT. 2019); Waiting For Another Time, Apalazzo
Gallery (Brescia, IT. 2018);
Where is Luna?, CURA Basement (Roma, IT. 2018); Blue Pen, David Dale Gallery (Glasgow, UK. 2018); Give Up The Ghost,
curated by Vincent Honoré, Baltic Triennial
13 (Vilnius, LT. 2018); Everything Was Forever, Until it Was No More, RIBOCA1 Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art (Riga,
LV. 2018); How To LiveTogether, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, AU. 2017); Four Sheds,
Fogo Island Arts (Newfoundland, CA. 2016); Housewarming, Emalin (London,
UK. 2016); Phillip, Lukas & Isidora, SALTS (Basel, CH. 2015).