Augustas Serapinas at Emalin

Artist: Augustas Serapinas

Exhibition title: Housewarming

Venue: Emalin, London, UK

Date: September 28 – October 29, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Emalin, London

Emalin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Augustas Serapinas. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with Emalin, which inaugurates Emalin’s gallery space in London. Concurrently, Augustas is staging the performance Jõusaal (gym) in the context of LIVE Presentations at Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park.

For his exhibition at Emalin, Augustas explores the potential of the gallery space to host alternative encounters between people and temporal contexts. Visitors confront a replica of the gallery that assumes the qualities of a sauna, providing a sense of privacy that alters the social experience of the space. At the same time, the installation enters into dialogue with the building’s history: prior to Emalin opening its premises here, Unit 4 of Huntingdon Estate was occupied by a locksmith. Hundreds of keys left behind by the previous tenant were melted and recast to produce the cabin’s door-handle, ladle, bucket and shower-curtain hooks. The locksmith’s safe is reencountered as a stove for the cabin, while his file-drawers are refunctioned for safekeeping of valuables during sauna sessions. All cast metalwork designs are based on drawings by another neighbor of the Estate, who has been working onsite as a printer since his teenage years.

Visitors are invited to make use of the installation by singing up for 30 minute slots in the office area. Linen towels are provided for the duration of each session.

Augustas’ practice is invested in recomposing socially engaged spaces in order to foreground and problematize the assumptions that shape them. By inverting the customary functions of objects and spatiality, Serapinas toys with the possibilities of the encounter – with art and with the social relations it engenders, as a phenomenon and an opportunity.

Augustas Serapinas (b. 1990 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Lives and works in Vilnius) attended the Rupert Educational Program in Vilnius, LT (2014) and completed a BA Fine Arts from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius, LT (2013) and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK (2013). Recent exhibitions include Dusting the Grounds, David Roberts Art Foundation (London, UK – 2016); Philip, Lukas & Isidora, SALTS (Basel, CH – 2015); Double Bind, Rupert (Vilnius, LT – 2015); 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, (Moscow, RU – 2015) and The Future of Memory. An Exhibition on the Infinity of the Present Time, Kunsthalle Wien, (Vienna, AU – 2015).