‘We are not simple witnesses of what is occurring. We are the bodies through which the mutation arrives to stay. The question is no longer who we are but what we are going to become’ (Paul B. Preciado, translated from Spanish by the author).
The exhibition Inflammation represents a dialogue between the artist duo, founded in 2014, comprising Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda, and the avant-garde painter Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė (1933–2007), whose work has only recently received well-deserved recognition in Lithuania. Curated by Valentinas Klimašauskas and João Laia, who worked together for the recent Baltic Triennial, and assisted by the architects Ona Lozuraitytė-Išorė and Petras Išora-Lozuraitis, who have realised other projects with the artists, this collaborative installation showcased in the historic Chiesa di Sant’Antonin brings together expressions and reflections rooted in contemporary and modern artistic practices. It evokes both discomfort and potential alliances, offering ways of understanding images and events from the present and the past. This collective-based exploration aims to acknowledge the enduring impacts of troubling experiences and trauma on the collective body, while also envisioning pathways towards healing for both individual organisms and planetary subjectivities.
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
Closed for many years, the Church of Sant’Antonin, hosting the Lithuanian Pavilion for the first time, remained a secretive, hidden space. With its Baroque campanile topped by an onion-shaped dome towering boldly above the surrounding Castello area, the edifice somehow reminded me of churches in Vilnius. The connection between this year’s ‘Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque’, the Biennale Arte’s exhibition theme, and the Lithuanian Pavilion’s feverish techno-organism, conceived by Pakui Hardware, cannot be interpreted solely through the prism of migrating bodies and their geopolitical identities. How does this exhibition position itself in the context of the statement made by the curator Adriano Pedrosa, who advocates for decolonial perspectives that embrace non-heteronormative subjectivities and the inclusion of overlooked bodies and voices? The main exhibition offers an opportunity to encounter works by a number of artists based in the Global South who may appear peripheral, as well as diaspora artists from Italy residing abroad in the past, many of whom have remained relatively unknown, and might not have been showcased otherwise. Who then, would be the eponymous strangers in relation to the practice of Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, whose practices are deeply focused on themes of body-related representation and their different environments?
Pakui Hardware, Inflammation, 2023. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
I’m thinking of a ‘foreign body’, or Fremdkörper in German, a familiar term used to describe an object entering a human or non-human body, often unwanted and intrusive. Its impact can vary, depending on size: it might penetrate the skin, be absorbed, cause irritation or damage to organs, or remain unnoticed until a reaction occurs. Let’s assume that this peculiar entity or object persists and expands its influence, eventually attempting to cover the entire planet, resulting in diverse symptoms. In such a scenario, what alternative tools, vastly different from those used in medical examinations, could we employ to identify what is at stake? Especially considering that what was once considered ‘foreign’, strange or alien becomes increasingly pervasive, rendering it more challenging to pinpoint any potential dangers, if they exist at all.
Pakui Hardware, whose exhibition in Venice marks ten active years of collaboration, often address their interest in ‘capital travelling through bodies and materials’.[1] The duo’s signature style, well-known outside the Baltic States, was shaped over the last decade, combining organic-looking and synthetic materials, examining different theories and formats of their presentations, and eventually creating platforms for apparently different ideas and bodies coming together. Their biomorphic sculptural installations evoke synthetic cells or organs and (often post-human) organisms, alongside environments and systems they inhabit, resonating with the characteristics of living entities or appendages, while also hinting at mechanical constructs or their remnants. Through this, the duo Pakui Hardware delves into themes such as bio-politics, techno-automation, acceleration, and other facets of modern existence. One of their references, as the curators address in the introduction, is Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (2021), a book that explores how socio-political processes intertwine with physical manifestations in vulnerable human bodies, highlighting titular inflammatory process as a natural reaction to unsettling external conditions. This concept addresses how political developments correlate with processes in our bodies, illustrating their similarities. Inflammatory process is an ancient and natural bodily response to unhealthy conditions that persist both in contemporary and historical contexts. In other words, contrary to the prevailing Western way of thinking, it is not about treating individual organs, but entire systems, because emergent states concern entire bodies, not fragments of them.
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
The environmental installation created by Pakui Hardware encompasses and pays tribute to the painterly œuvre of Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė. This presentation may echo themes explored in some of her most notable oil painting series, such as X-Ray (1977–1983), which emerged from her interest in medicine during the 1960s and continued to evolve over the subsequent two decades. Over the years, Rožanskaitė managed to shape her unique artistic path, focused on bodies both as objects and subjects, addressing notions of care in the past Soviet occupation, under the period’s medical technologies and its oppressive systems among others, and eventually extending her practice into other media. Having witnessed her father’s tragic disappearance, deportation to Siberia and starvation were among the experiences of her childhood that clearly shaped the artist’s perception in the years after her return to Lithuania, when she eventually entered the State Art Institute (now Vilnius Academy of Art) and its community, although she could not easily adapt to it.
We read in the publication accompanying the The Endless Frontier exhibition, also curated by Klimašauskas and Laia: ‘For Rožanskaitė, the process of looking is very important in itself, not only at the painting, but also through it, thus opening the inner spaces of the work.’[2] Indeed, the gaze of the viewer is as important as some of the depicted figures, focused, silent, and seeking diagnosis, both the ones examined and those exercising control. The artist’s work is characterised by her style: in the bodies she portrayed and the rooms, mostly surgeries or convalescence spaces, or rooms for care, she used bold colour combinations and specific contours, creating a surprisingly non-sterile, almost pop ambiance.
Her sensibility is evident, even in her almost abstract painterly pieces such as Cosmic Composition (1979) and Fantastic Composition (1979), positioned near the entrance of the exhibition, as well as modernist-figurative works in Disease (1985) and Reinforcement Rods (1986), which are more centrally showcased in capacious glass boxes bathed in a fluorescent glow. Rožanskaitė’s works possess a clear consistency of scenes she chose and an almost sculptural quality, evoking a sort of tangible presence. Despite her posthumous recognition, the artist became a role model for younger generations of artists who would look for a point of reference from creators who were able to transcend temporal boundaries. While there have been several occasions in recent years to showcase Rožanskaitė’s work, including exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Centre and the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, and recently at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, the significance of presenting her work in Venice lies in its potential for broader public visibility.
Their large-scale installation Inflammation, resembling ‘techno-organism’, as described in the press release, debuted in Vilnius at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art late in 2023, and parts of the series were included in their first solo exhibition in Madrid earlier this year, along with the series Heat Treated (2024). As with many previously made sculptural installations, the duo crafted their work using metal, aluminium in this case, resulting in a spatial, scaled drawing combined with glass, which has become a signature element of their artistic practice.
Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Heart, 1987. Oil on canvas, 130 × 90 cm. Photo: Vidmantas Ilčiukas. Courtesy of the artist’s family
. Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Cosmic Composition, 1979. Oil on cardboard, 122 × 105 cm. Photo: Vidmantas Ilčiukas. Courtesy of the artist’s family
Inflammation takes over the central stage of the church, transforming it into a meditative space rather than just an exhibition space. The marble floor of the church is partially covered with dunes crafted from shredded, recycled plastic elements, ‘faults of the earth’, to borrow phrasing from the title of the accompanying text by Estelle Hoy.[3] Certain parts of the installation are finished with aluminium-formed leaves touching the stone flooring, resembling Sosnowsky’s hogweed, an alien plant species referenced by Pakui Hardware in their earlier-mentioned Madrid exhibition. Contact with this toxic plant can induce severe skin irritation, potentially leading to fatality. Originally introduced as a silage plant in numerous countries of the USSR and Poland during the mid-20th century, the plant swiftly proved to be extraordinarily invasive, difficult to eradicate, and capable of continuously sprouting.
In the midst of this irregular central platform, composed of synthetic residue and partially melted surfaces, emerge essential components of Inflammation. Laser projections emanate from glass ‘hearts’, delicately tracing ephemeral ‘drawings’ on the church’s wall. Transitioning to sculptural drawings crafted from metal, alongside Teresė Marija Rožanskaitė’s paintings, a shared space for artistic contemplation materialises, reminiscent of her work, particularly the already-mentioned Disease (1985), a depiction of a patient against an abstract grey backdrop, outlined through a carmin silhouette, encircled by columns or the vertical lines of a support structure, simultaneously guiding and delineating the body’s presence, and fragmenting it, and eventually contrasting with the spatial installation where organs or organic forms are shaped in a more free-form manner, bodies rather than elements of infrastructure, fragile rather than rigid, connecting rather than dividing.
Above this corporeal platform formed by the sculptures and paintings of the contributing artists, a hoop-like structure hovers, supported on steel stilts, surrounding visitors with a band of light as they navigate through the nave. Here, the juxtaposition of dystopia and the sacred becomes apparent, where the discarded find new life, and the afflicted encounter hope. Additionally, the installation disrupts the traditional order of the old church, redirecting movement from the previously inaccessible sanctuary towards the nave, transforming the space once filled by parishioners into an interactive altar, blending the organic, technological and inflamed.
Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Heart Surgery, 1974. Oil on cardboard, 240 × 170 cm. Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
The integration of hand-blown glass, crafted by an artisanal studio in France, seamlessly intertwined with the sculptural elements of Inflammation, along with lasers projecting light on to the church walls, and the plastic components sourced from a Vilnius-based company, destined to be returned to their origin when the exhibition ends, combined with Pakui Hardware’s decision to collaborate with the same architects again (their collaboration began with the preparations for their solo exhibition in MUMOK, Vienna in 2016), prompts contemplation on the ecological dimensions of the exhibition, which seems like an organic extension of the subjects encapsulated in the title. Their long-term interest and concerns regarding environmental issues are visible through a number of realisations, addressing the hidden processes within different bodies or their surfaces, and conveying dystopian visions of forms of post-human life.
Perhaps it is worth noting that another Lithuanian project addressed the climate catastrophe in other ways, namely the opera performance Sun & Sea (Marina) by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, which won the Golden Lion at the 58th International Art Exhibition. And this was when the Venice Biennale famously adopted the title May You Live in Interesting Times, just before the halting of interaction and travelling due to Covid-19. While these times may fade from memory, the complexity they introduced lingers. Amidst the backdrop of current geopolitical shifts, such as the ongoing full-scale russian invasion of Ukraine, or the genocide in Gaza, which challenge notions of health-care access and medical assistance, affecting countries in the region, and obviously their ecosystems, Pakui Hardware’s installation and its implicit themes illustrate how much has changed in just a few years.
The curator duo emphasise that the exhibition possesses a dual-collective dimension, starting from its curation, the earlier-mentioned architects whose landscape-oriented installation was consulted with a light artist Eugenijus Sabaliauskas, and culminating in the central artwork. Pakui Hardware have been interested in the work of Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė since around 2018. They referenced it for the first time during their solo exhibition ‘Virtual Care’ at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, an exhibition prepared during Covid as a digital exhibition, presented publicly only a year later (2021), imagining the future of health care, according to the visions of the post-pandemic realm. Perhaps this collaborative aspect, more than their projects realised earlier, marks another step in their careers, but it simply goes in line with the relational aesthetics the artists seem to reference, forging alliances with other contemporary artists and other professionals with whom they have collaborated in recent years, including the performing artist Ania Nowak and the choreographer Frédéric Gies.
Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Disease, 1985. Oil on canvas, 150 × 130 cm. Photo by: Antanas Lukšėnas. Courtesy of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
We read in the note by the architects in the publication: ‘Two horizons, a hybrid soil terrain and a hybrid machine with mechanical prosthetic limbs, merge and shape an in-between space within which the entities created by Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė are stationed. These horizons encounter one another and coexist, forming a delirious stratigraphy or techno-organism encapsulated within the poly-historical hall of St Anthony’s Church.’ Their spatial intervention boldly transcends conventional architecture, being better characterised as performative work, since in order to be properly seen by visitors it has to be walked around. The installation they crafted harmonises with the installation-painterly work of both Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė. As we read in the introduction, the design by Ona Lozuraitytė-Išorė and Petras Išora-Lozuraitis references Rožanskaitė’s 1985 work.
The act of including the work of Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė in the exhibition is not solely a gesture; it signifies a genuine interest in her work, and serves as an act imbued with various meanings, offering a fresh look at the work of Pakui Hardware, especially in the context of healing the collective body, both in cosmic and individual dimensions. It allows us to get a broader picture of the duo’s potential references to and interest in complex relationships between bodies and authorities. To the viewers of the Lithuanian Pavilion, it serves to better understand the work of Rožanskaitė, who sought to show in her work the persistent imperfections of ‘modern’ technologies, and the alleged care of bodies subjected to control in the past. The artist was able to show the fragility of human existence and its failed environment. In the context of rare representations of inflammatory conditions, other artists come to mind, touching on the topic of mutating bodies and feverish states.
Pakui Hardware’s installation demonstrates remarkably that what is different, seemingly disparate, and perceived separately from one another, has the potential to come together to create new meanings, and perhaps to help us see how things could look otherwise, and become less damaging to communities and landscapes if serious action is undertaken. Even when the artists’ works, portraying dystopian scenarios unfolding before our eyes, appear to merely symbolically depict the discomforts prevailing in our reality, these serve as filters for understanding the post-human conditions of contemporary living. Therefore, delving into themes of mutating bodies and feverish states is no longer speculation, but offers glimpses of a future that is closer to realisation than one might anticipate.
[1] This phrasing can be found in a number of biographies and press releases for Pakui Hardware’s solo and group exhibitions.
[2] Baltic Triennial 14: The Endless Frontier (A Reader), eds. Valentinas Klimašauskas and João Laia, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius and Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2022, p. 74.
[3] Estelle Hoy, Imposter Syndrome: Pavilions Built on Faults de la Terre, in Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė. INFLAMMATION, Pavilion of Lithuania, 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia, Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Mousse Publishing, 2024.
Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Fantastic Composition, 1979. Oil on cardboard, 115 × 105 cm. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy the artist’s family
Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Fantastic Composition, 1979. Oil on cardboard, 115 × 105 cm. Photo by: Vidmantas Ilčiukas. Courtesy the artist’s family
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė, Inflammation, 2024. Pavilion of Lithuania at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Ugnius Gelguda. Courtesy of the artists, Lithuanian National Museum of Art and carlier | gebauer (Berlin/Madrid)
