Open Studio

E04 Augustas Serapinas

Rupert Open Studio introduces Augstas Serapinas, a successful and internationally recognized Lithuanian artist who in 2019 became the youngest participant of the Venice Biennale. His work explores space and architecture, seeking hidden “pockets” in design, where he contributes through his ironic yet sensitive artwork. By creating installations, curating space and ready-mades, he opens questions of human interaction with the surroundings, finitude of cultural norms and conceptions, and the aesthetics of natural decomposition. The discussion evolves from spatiality and temporality of his work, to cultural recycling, to the human subject, and how building snowmen can help resolve questions of public commemoration.

E03 Inside Job

Inside Job is an art collective by Ula Lucińska and Michał Knychaus from Poznan, Poland. In acts of dark “artistic sci-fi”, they transform spaces into post-humanist scenarios, transcending time, space and media. They create installations that recite spatial storylines, which the viewer can mix, match and discover. In doing so, they also polemicize with a variety of thinkers, authors and ideas, from eco-fiction to cultural and technological critique, to classics in horror fiction. Their work is atmospheric and consists of elements of graphics, sculpture textile, sound and other media, all of which serves to create a “portal” to another possible reality, where humans are gone or had just left, and the world is ruled by nature, machine and a mixture thereof.

E02 Vitalij Strigunkov

Vitalij Strigunkov is a conceptual artist from Lithuania with a truly international profile who manipulates video, audio material, objects, space, situations and representations to explore a variety of topics, from the notion of copyrights and authorship to statehood, to time constructs and beyond. Originally trained as a painter, his canvass is now the cultural fabric, at which an art piece exists and gains value. In his exploration of what he calls the cultural capital, Vitalij challenges our daily market value rituals through submitting them to deconstruction through repetition, ruthless poetization and piercing observation.

E01 Anastasia Sosunova

The first episode of the podcast introduces Anastasia Sosunova, a Lithuanian artist and a member of Rupert Alumni board. Anastasia combines installation, sculpture, graphic art and drawing to explore topics of identity, cultural heritage and symbols. She draws from her personal experience as a member of a Russian ethnic minority to interrogate the conditions under which national, historical and personal narratives are established, experienced and challenged.