Arturas Bukauskas | Andrius Šarapovas | a line running along both sides of the sea level
23/2/2022 – 10/3/2022
VAA gallery ARTIFEX
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An exhibition with a fragmented title
The exhibition consists of two parts. One is installed at the Artifex gallery, the other one is upcoming later in Germany at the Henrichenburg boat lift industrial museum.
Bukauskas:
The ship and plane of Theseus. The Theseus ship paradox raises raises the question whether a ship which has had all of its parts gradually replaced remains the same ship. The plane of Theseus is an object whose parts have been replaced on the ground, then in the air, during the fall, then on the ground again, with numerous rearrangements of the crash site and stuffed dummies of the pilots. The question is whether we are a part of this plane, and perhaps an already replaced one. How are the functions of memory redistributed in a body that expires? How does memory reorganise those functions in movements? Can a shared reminiscence be triggered by an external action? An accident is constantly materialised by motion, while every moved object is a projection of an accident.
The exhibition features bodies (like computer storage media undergoing defragmentation) that have ceased resisting both the external gaze and the attempts to provide care to them. Bodies as the totality of replaceable parts. Bodies which, when moved, remind of the possibility of unfinished actions. The question of truth is irrelevant, because the real is no longer confined to the bodily senses. The position of a contemporary artist that is reconsidered in the exhibition is also no longer any bodily position – the artist has come to the store and forgot the shopping list. The intention was to copy the actions of buying, to pretend to act against them, in a politically and socially active way – and instead the artist froze. The viewer is invited to be a witness to that and to date (as in dating, i. e. making obsolete over time) together. A few actions remain relevant.
‘Can you really use a spoon though?’
Šarapovas:
Every sound is a small earthquake. Or not so small. The aural environment – the vehicle of tactile memory – is experienced as a very real and tangible yet also somewhat spectral manifestation of the past reality. The listener perceives sound as their present; sound testifies: these are incidents of temporal reality, I reproduce them in your surfaces. The world also experiences your presence in the sea of air as sound.
It says: I am Sisyphus, a swarm of small Sisyphi; and immediately pretends to be null, an invariable repetition, a loop. Helmholtz takes a knife and divides a circle into two equal parts. That is how the sine wave, the mother of all sounds, is born.
Mare Memoria, the sea of memory, is the movement of molecules in liquids, gases and solid bodies, waves constantly rolling on the shore of the listener’s ear, rubbing stories of ever new catastrophes into their cochlea.
A second-long sound cycle – one ascent and one descent of the sine wave – travels 343 metres in air at 20°C and moderate humidity at sea level.
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Arturas Bukauskas graduated in Film Directing from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), currently works as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Photography, Animation, and Media Art of Vilnius Academy of Arts. He briefly defines his field of interests as research into moving image in extended reality, and thus employs various tools such as 360° video, animation, and VR in his visual experiments.
Andrius Šarapovas is an artist working with sound and other forms of vibration who has produced a number of kinetic installations, sound objects, kinetic/acoustic and electroacoustic generative music pieces, as well as soundtracks for film, theatre, and animation. He studied sculpture in Israel and has been taking part in exhibitions since 2003.
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Opening of the exhibition will take place on the 23rd of February (Wednesday) at 6 PM at VAA gallery Artifex (Gaono str.1, Vilnius).
Please wear a respirator during the opening.
