The Reverse Side of Time. The exhibition ‘before swimming’ by Gediminas G. Akstinas at the Medūza gallery

 

It’s hard to imagine Louis XVI standing on the execution scaffold with a trembling heart, envisioning that his ghost would one day be reborn in the form of a transparent polycarbonate plastic chair. Yet the imagination of the designer Philippe Starck revived the monarch’s spirit, transforming it into a mass-produced technological marvel, the famous ‘Louis Ghost’ chair, shaped as a seamless, transparent body from a single, undivided mould. In different corner of Europe, at a different time, the imagination of Gediminas G. Akstinas turned this chair into a portal through which viewers enter the artist’s manufactured reality. Manufactured, because it is precisely the relationship and the tension between anonymous mass production and the individual creative gesture that have shaped the core of the artist’s work in recent years.

On entering the spaces of the Medūza gallery, Gediminas G. Akstinas’ exhibition ‘before swimming’, the eye is immediately drawn to a small, dark photograph on the left (Untitled, 2024). Upon closer inspection, the ghostly outlines of ‘Louis Ghost’ chairs arranged in tight rows in an attic gradually emerge. Bathed in a yellowish light, their transparent forms shimmer between material presence and disappearance, between the past and countless future replicas. These alloys of time, imagination and engineering, captured in the artist’s memory, find themselves embodied once more in another reproducible form, the photograph. The ghosts disseminate further.

Turning your gaze to the right, just below (human) eye level, hangs Cutout (2024). Here lies an entire coordinate system to helping one not to get lost in the exhibition. Abstract shapes, applied to the paper’s surface using book restoration techniques, are, in fact, cutouts, patterns for sewing clothing for animals. Imagination sparks, and the prototype peels of from its function: garments anthropomorphising animals unfurl into the pages of abstract art. The cutouts adhere to the surfaces that support them: grids used in drafting, mathematically defining the precise scale of objects and environments. Here, as you lean closer towards the dense grid, a rupture occurs in reality, and the familiar laws of time, scale and materiality cease to apply.

When stepping into the second hall of the gallery, all the exhibition’s works gaze back at the visitor. Cutouts of the clock face from Vilnius Cathedral’s bell tower, crafted from the soothing blue pool liner, cover nearly half the exhibition space (City Clock, 2024). The absence of clock hands does not diminish the weight of ‘great’ time pressing down on the visitor’s body, as her own hand slides effortlessly through the hole at the centre of the clock’s ‘ghost’. The rectangular hole replicates the access point designed for the clockmaker to adjust the clock hands forwards or backwards twice a year. Yet individual time can be just as perplexing, so the artist multiplies it by creating two cutouts of wristwatch faces. These lie stretched out in miniature glass cube-galleries on the Medūza windowsill (Wristwatch, 2024). The rupture in reality expands, oozing a viscous fluid of irrationality. After all, it us who want to believe water is azure, even though its colour emanates from the bluish rubber liner at the pool’s bottom. Materials are accomplices in the falsification of reality.

Shells (2024), reminiscent of anthropomorphic-scale white modernist sculptures, are no less deceptive. Their smooth, geometric surfaces are embraced by slender, softly contoured plaster cutouts, concealing the prosaic nature of these abstract forms. Reaching the gallery’s back wall, the works in the exhibition reveal their full nakedness. A sight that almost compels one to avert the eyes. The interiors of Shells are cobbled together from metal construction strips, while the forms themselves are pieced together from scraps of drywall and plaster partition boards. These sculptures transform into architecture, much like the crumbling models of Frederick Kiesler’s endless architecture, which the architect’s own body once explored. The reverse side of the blue pool liner is white; in the double layer of the pool’s bottom, the water is transparent. Materials dismantle the fabricated reality.

However, it is not only the exhibition that has its ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ sides. The entire exhibition space is turned inside out like a white glove. By framing a glass pane with brightly coloured mounting foam in one of the gallery’s windows, and sealing another with drywall, the artist transforms the gallery into yet another shell, with visitors’ bodies moving within its interior. Architecture becomes sculpture, while the drafting grid, in its limitations, drives one to despair. By choosing everyday materials, so familiar they verge on the banal, the artist momentarily halts the production conveyor, freeing both the materials and the minds that oversee their fabrication from their imposed functions. Engaging in a imaginary dialogue with the abstract glass works by Marija Olšauskaitė, an artist of the younger generation, which explore the intersections of mass production, error and craft, Akstinas introduces the possibility of individual gestures, craftsmanship and creativity, within a rigidly reproducible reality.

This is not merely a poetic artist’s perspective on today’s economic and social landscape. It holds a far more powerful charge. By halting the conveyor, Akstinas suspends the current order of things, creating a brief rupture, a moment to collectively or individually explore alternative possibilities for the present and the future. A cutout does not have to become a garment, the ghosts of past monarchs can transform into harmless transparent chairs, a plaster wall can become an abstract sculpture, and public time can stretch into a blue liner. All it takes is to lift time from the bottom and look at its reverse side.