M HKA Ensembles

° 1990

Born in Vilnius (LT), lives in Vilnius (LT).

Augustas Serapinas is interested in the socially engaged and non-material practice of previous generations of artists, such as the one that emerged around the time of his own birth. The early 1990s saw the rise of the ‘relational’ approach to practicing art with, for and through other people. This could also be a good definition for ‘curating’, another term dating from the same period. His experiments with social interaction start from an openness to the encounter, which, as philosopher Alain Badiou points out, differs from experience because it is always based on improbability. The encounter (as a possibility, an act or, if we like, a manifestation of free will) is also fundamentally opposed to the notion of identity (which essentially regulates sameness) and certainly to its instrumentalisation as identity politics.

Yet Serapinas is not exclusively concerned with the non-material and inter-personal. He has also busied himself with the discovery and construction of ‘secret spaces’: pockets of subjectivity carved out of the rational infrastructure that society tries to build for itself. (AK)