The Lithuanian artist duo Pakui Hardware will be representing the country at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Their work Inflammation explores the topic of the climate crisis and the fevers that consume the planet and its people.
Parts of the installation are currently displayed in Vilnius, tourism and business promotion agency Go Vilnius writes in a press release.
The inflamed planet
Lithuanian creators are reflecting the pertinent dangers of the climate crisis: the planet and the people are consumed by the fever of destruction. The Pakui Hardware collective, based in Vilnius and Berlin, is looking at them in their new solo exhibition Inflammation.
The collective and the exhibition have been selected to represent Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2024, which will run between April 20 and November 24.
Meanwhile, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art will present the country’s pavilion at home. Currently, one part of Inflammation is displayed in the Museum of Applied Arts and Design in Vilnius.
The large-scale exhibition depicts the “flaming” planet and human bodies, a scorched landscape with plastic soil dunes, dreamlike arches of geological and pre-historical fossils, and inflamed artificial objects that resemble human organs. Through surreal artistic imagery, the artists use inflammation – which, medically, signifies a defensive reaction of the body to remove the harmful stimuli and induce healing – as a metaphor to reflect on the damage inflicted on humanity and the planet.
Body and medicine
One of the sources of inspiration was Marya Rupa and Raj Patel’s book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. The book, just like the exhibition, connects humanity with the planet and questions the segmentation of the mind from the body and humans from nature.
Ona Lozuraitytė-Išorė and Petras Išora-Lozuraitis designed the architectural part of the installation. The plastic used for the exhibition is seen as a highly durable fossil that will outlive generations and is one of the areas of inflammation that afflict the planet’s ecosystems.
The artists behind the Pakui Hardware collective, Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda, have included artworks of the Lithuanian modernist painter Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė whose paintings have explored the relationship between the body and medicine.
Pakui Hardware’s exhibition explores the subject that has been addressed by Lithuania’s past pavilions in Venice. In 2019, it featured the opera-performance Sun & Sea (Marina). The piece, created by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė, won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.
Pakui Hardware’s Inflammation at the Museum of Applied Arts and Design in Vilnius will run until February 11.
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