Medūza is proud to present “Counterfates”, the first solo exhibition in Lithuania by Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian. The four new works on display in Vilnius continue the exploration of the “Gharīb” series, which made its debut at the Armenian Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale. “Counterfates” delves into the themes of artificiality and forgeries, both manifesting through contemporary and historical sonic phenomena. Throughout the exhibition Arutiunian further traverses sonic dissent, aural cosmologies and vernacular knowledge.
As described by Arutiunian himself, “Counterfates” serves as a reinterpretation of artifice and authenticity through their sonic and political aspects.The theme of counterfeit arises from an incident during the 2022 Venice Biennale: the Gharīb pavilion’s vinyl was stolen and substituted with a fake, forged one. This record now constitutes one of the works within the exhibition, named “A Gift That Keeps on Giving”. Instead of playing noise, the record itself has been transformed into a twittering speaker, emitting the sounds of Arutiunian’s original vinyl.
The exhibition also includes “Synthetic Exercises”, an installation created with the assistance of artificial intelligence. This work employs synthesized human vocal sounds, meticulously reconstructed following a specialized protocol, and rendered through an autotune software. Interestingly, the roots of auto-tuning technology can be traced back to the petroleum industry’s exploration of subterranean oil reservoirs—an unexpected juxtaposition that is reflected in the exhibition spaces.
This is also the first time Arutiunian is presenting a video work called “Ultrasilence” which depicts a spontaneous act of illegal gathering, as well as neon lights which can be traced back to the materials used in the oil industry.
Finally, “Counterfates” also features “Armen,” which was first heard in Lithuania in 2016 and will be presented in conjunction with the “Muzika erdvėje” festival. “Armen” is a composition that draws from the music of the Armenian diaspora, sourced from the artist’s personal record collection. The latest rendition of “Armen” will be experienced during special drives around Vilnius. During the exhibition’s opening weekend, the piece will be played inside the 1990’s Mercedes-Benz, parked near Medūza’s premises. The visitors are invited to join the 40-minute long ride through a route in Vilnius and listen to the composition played from a newly-released audio cassette.
Oily Harmonics, Noisy Dissent
Wherever oil is found, a desert follows. It flattens landscapes and devours vegetation, it restricts movement and forbids encounters. Upon its discovery at the depths of Earth’s crust, it envelops the surface in an opaque veil. To complement the flatlands of its extraction, it reaches downward up to the very nadir, and stretches upwards via the rhythmic movement of pumps and erected walls. It is the Black Gold, Gaia’s aromatic juice, the lifeblood of the Earth. It preserves Sun’s energy in a condensed, ancient form and yet, is itself hidden from its gaze.
However, even if unseen it is both the origin and terminus of everything seen – a transcendental. It is an uncomfortable truth that oil and its subproducts have become the material strata of our experience. This is why it organizes everything imaginable while eluding our imagination. Even if in plain sight, we’d rather choose not to see it, as upon encounter, in the words of Amitav Ghosh, it reeks, it stinks, it becomes a Problem that can be written about only in the language of Solutions.[1] [1]
For a while now, at least in the West, we have become accustomed to seeking solace in the fevered reverie of limitless rational thought – its pragmatism and its normalizing power. Little did we anticipate that this rationality would be constrained not by possibility of human experience, but by the grip of petroleum. In Negarestani‘s Cyclonopedia we encounter an unsettling diagnosis among the notes of a semi-fictitious group of rogue academics, called the Hyperstition Collective:
The cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events. Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political but also that of the ethics of life on earth. Oil lubes the whole desert expedition toward Tellurian Omega (either as the Desert of God or the host of singularity, the New Earth).[2] [2]
Within this Petrofiction, oil emerges as the unifying element in the planet’s inhuman eschatological visions. It either renders the Earth a desolate wasteland, mirroring apocalyptic prophecies and religious extremism, or propels us into a technological singularity, where humanity surrenders its dominion to fantasies of techno-capitalism. The pervasiveness of oil in the all encompassing variety of things ultimately leads to a world of sameness and repetition.
In this light, it seems less paradoxical that the algorithmic basis of Auto-Tune has its roots in Exxon, a giant of the oil industry. Invented by the same person, the technology utilizes similar math to that which allows for sonically mapping the geological subsurface in the search for oil. After the initial backlash of Cher’s Believe, today the technology is said to be used in 99% of western contemporary music. It effectively transformed today’s soundscape by eliminating imperfections and overtaking our vocal cords. Via Auto-Tune, one can posit that petroleum’s transformative potential genuinely bestows harmony upon the world.
Still, harmony serves as means to silence noise, to flatten and homogenize anything that might strike one’s ears as discordant. By doing away with all that doesn’t immediately please, serve a purpose, or conform, harmony takes on the guise of deafness, rendering everything ‘other’ as desolate. An observation from The Parasite comes to mind:
As far as I know, Serres writes, perfect tuning is not the height of art, and perhaps it is only its misery. Might harmony be a somewhat excited variety of flatness? Might it be an antechamber of death?[3] [3]
Wherever harmony sings, a desert begins to take shape. Could a fate of sameness and repetition, of deafness and alienation, be countered? How does one fight a parasite that multiplies by consuming itself? How does one cut an uroboros? In another line, Serres observes, that:
Noise nourishes a new order. Organization, life, and intelligent thought live between order and noise, between disorder and perfect harmony. If there were only order, if we only heard perfect harmonies, our stupidity would soon fall down toward a dreamless sleep… There are two ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid— a head-first dive into chaos or stabilized installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony.[4] [4]
Could we ourselves become parasitic upon the parasite that we brought forth ourselves? Is it possible we re-introduce dissonance into the perfection of the system? Are we capable of enduring differences without relapsing to violence of identities? By mimicking, by producing counterfeits, by making them our own, yet not assimilating to a rigid logic? As if by accident, the desert could turn out to become a rainforest…
a text by Audrius Pocius
About the Artist
Andrius Arutiunian (b.1991) is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer based in the Netherlands. Trained as a composer, Arutiunian studied at the Royal Conservatory The Hague. Arutiunian works with hybrid forms of sound through installations, film, sculpture and performances.
Sonic dissent, alternate modes of political and musical organisation, and playful investigation of esoteric and vernacular histories form Arutiunian’s most recent works. Through aural cosmologies, non-western tunings and musical systems, as well as extensive studies of resonance and speculative instruments, the artist works with sound as a world-ordering method. Using hypnotic and enigmatic forms, Arutiunian’s works often question the notion of musical and political attunement.
Recent solo shows include the 59th Venice Biennale, Pavilion of Armenia, Gharīb (Venice, 2022); Diaphonics at Centrala (Birmingham, 2023), and Incantations at CTM and silent green (Berlin, 2021).
Selected group shows and performances include Le Fresnoy and Centre Pompidou (Tourcoing), M HKA (Antwerp), Stroom (The Hague), The 14th Kaunas Biennial, Stedelijk (Amsterdam), Survival Kit 13 (Riga), documenta 14 Parliament of Bodies (Kassel), Radicants and Slavs and Tatars’ Pickle Bar (Paris), gb agency (Paris), FACT (Liverpool), Rewire Festival (The Hague), and Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius).
Andrius Arutiunian is a selected DAAD fellow in Berlin 2023-24. Other residencies include Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt), Amant (Siena), Rupert (Vilnius), Cite Internationale des Arts (Paris), EMARE/EMAP (Liverpool), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Newcastle), and ZKM | Centre for Art and Media (Karlsruhe).
In Place of a Colophon
The exhibition is curated by Audrius Pocius
The installation was realized by Antanas Gerlikas
Graphic design was done by Vytautas Volbekas
PR and communication was the work of Deimantė Bulbenkaitė
The project was coordinated by Eglė Agnė Benkunskytė
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all those who contributed their time and thoughts to the realization of this exhibition. Radik Arutiunian for endless support, Alex Bondarev for her agile translation, Edgaras Banevičius for providing us with a bitumen furnace, Anne Davidian for thoughtful advice and support in concept development, Armantas Gečiauskas for producing the audio cassettes, Yiannis Tsirikoglou for sound programing, Laura Kaminskaitė for her kindness and advice, Andrius Knystautas and Bituma for their help in procuring the installation materials, Grigorijus Karachanovas and Antanas Dombrovskij for sound support, Karolina Macytė for lending her voice for AI training, Agnė Matulevičiūtė and Matas Drukteinis and the whole team of Muzika erdvėje festival for their wonderful collaboration, Dovilis Paliukas for the handmade lathe-cuts, Alina Tikhonova for video editing, Arvydas Žalpys and the collective of Meno parkas for providing us with a projector, Eglė Ganda Bogdanienė and the community of Lithuanian Artists’ Association for believing in and supporting this project. Finally, we would also like to thank the neighbors of Medūza for their patience and understanding during the installation process.
We are grateful for the generous support from ZKM | Center for Art and Media, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and The Creative Industries Fund NL.
Counterfates would not have been possible without the generous financial support by Lithuanian Council for Culture
[1] [5] Ghosh, Amitav (1992) Petrofiction in The New Republic, March 2, pp. 29-33
[2] [6] Negarestani, Reza (2008) Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, Re:press, p. 14; This work of philosophical meta-fiction explores oil as a sentient and malevolent force by following the notes and traces of its main protagonist — dr. Hamid Parsani, in this case through the lens of the Hyperstition Collective. The Tellurian Omega mentioned here is to be understood as the teleological end of earth in the widest sense.
[3] [7] Serres, Michel (1982). The Parasite, University of Minnesota Press, p. 126
[4] [8] ibid., p. 127
Andrius Arutiunian
Counterfates
2023 09 08 – 2023 10 28
LDS Contemporary art and culture space Medūza
VšĮ “Šv. Jono g. galerija“ | 126122667
Šv. Jono g. 11, LT-01123 Vilnius
Photography: Alanas Gurinas