Artists: Pakui Hardware (Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda)
Exhibition title: Transactions
Venue: Podium, Oslo, Norway
Date: February 12 – 22, 2016
Photography: images copyright and courtesy the artists and Podium, Oslo
This show can be seen as a cube. Not a very large one. Part of it is immersed under the crust of earth, beneath the ocean’s floor; the other part is filled with water of extreme cold. And there is a chunk of a fat cable – the one connecting the North Americans and Europeans attached to their shiny screens via the so-called Internet. It is a cube of transactions. Flows of information run through the guts of the cable, which is surrounded and clothed with extremophiles. High-resolution images of the surfaces of celestial bodies move side by side with cat videos in the traffic of zeros and ones. Or these surfaces are actually close-ups of bacteria bodies? Inversions are inevitable in transactions. Intraterrestrials know it better than anyone else – their quiet life in the cracks of rocks beneath the floor of the ocean has been recently disturbed by the nosy scientists. They are too now put in transactions – inversed extraterrestrials that have not meant to be discovered, captured and became profile pictures. Notions of life, and space, and survival redefined. Again.
Oh, and there’s plastic. Loads of it.
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Pakui Hardware is the name (coined by curator Alex Ross) for the collaborative artist duo Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda, which began in 2014. Solo shows of the artists’ duo include venues of MUMOK, Vienna (forthcoming), Exo Exo, Paris (in collaboration with Fenêtre Project) (2016), kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga (2015), Jenifer Nails, Frankfurt (2014), Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius (2014), 321 Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2014), NADA New York (2014). Other latest projects include Threads: A Phantasmagoria about Distance, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud Kaunas, Lithuania, Popcorn, Pepsi, Petabytes: Intro, Cage, New York. The artists have participated in selected group shows at Bid Project, Milan (forthcoming), Valentin, Paris (2015), Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (2014), CCS Bard / Hessel Museum of Art, New York (2014).
With support from Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture
