Artists: Pakui Hardware (Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda)
Exhibition title: Virtual Care
Venue: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK
Date: May 19 – October 3, 2021
Photography: Rob Harris / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Pakui Hardware’s work considers the movement of capital through bodies, technology and materials and how it shapes our realities. Reminiscent of futuristic or biological settings, their hybrid sculptures and installations use materials such as glass, artificial fur, textiles, leather, chia seeds, soil, silicone, metal and plastics. In recent years, their work has explored questions around contemporary medicine, imagining possible futures where material limitations are transcended by fragmenting, multiplying and recreating human and non-human bodies.
The new installation at BALTIC, the space was transformed into an environment that resembles a clinical surgery room where human presence – with the exception of the visitor themselves – is replaced by technology. Glass objects affixed to a hanging surgical lamp sculpture create a sense of warmth and care, in contrast to the alienated coolness of its steel arms that make anthropomorphic reference to surgeon’s hands. Suspended between physical and virtual, bodily and digital, transparent thermoformed or resin ‘bodies’ are abstracted into sculptural biomorphic shapes that are both present and erased at the same time. Partially inspired by paintings by Lithuanian artist Terese Rozanskaite from the 1970s and 80s, these ‘bodies’ are traces, shells of ‘flesh’, dominated by technology.
Commissioned by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art Courtesy: the artists and carlier|gebauer, Berlin/Madrid Additional support by Lithuanian Institute for Culture
Pakui Hardware is the name for the collaborative artist duo Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda which began in 2014. The artists live and work between Berlin and Vilnius. Solo exhibitions include BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; Leopold-Hoesch Museum, Düren, DE; carlier | gebauer, Berlin; Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (MdbK), DE; Future Gallery Mexico; Tenderpixel gallery, London; Bielefelder Kunstverein, DE; MUMOK, Vienna; Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga; Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius. Group exhibitions include Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), Taiwan (forthcoming); National Gallery Prague, Czech Republic (forthcoming); MOCO La Panacée, Montpellier, FR; Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, TR; CCA Tel Aviv, IL; MAXXI, Rome; Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Kunsthalle Basel, CH; 13th Baltic Triennial at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; BOZAR, Brussels; SALTS, Basel, CH.
