Andrius Arutiunian:
In my practice, I explore the concept of time, weaving together narratives of contemporaneity, historiography, pop culture, and mythology. Working with installations, sculptures, films, or performances, I often draw on vernacular models of knowledge, contemporary cosmologies, and diasporic sound traditions, exploring listening as a political, musical, and bodily construct. I am also interested in material manifestations of time – how and through what means time-based media can transform our sense of duration, distance, and space. I studied composition, so sound is my primary creative impulse, and I approach it as a syncretic and sculptural element, with music functioning as a fluid architecture of time.
I also often work with industrial materials and various technologies whose origins or contemporary uses provide the works with a conceptual and material context. Bitumen, lasers, a DIY sound system, or geological time can come together here in a multilayered narrative. I am interested in the connections between extraction and creative technologies; for example, Auto-Tune algorithms, now widely used in pop music, were originally developed for oil exploration. In seminars, shared and questioning modes of thinking are important to me – we will work with students’ practices, discussing time, listening, and immaterial materiality as sculptural strategies.
