Augustas Serapinas

Margit, Maya, and Vanessa (2022)
Performances within the Framework of the Exhibition

Augustas Serapinas, Margit, Maya, and Vanessa (2022), performance, photo: Mathias Völzke

Courtesy of the artist

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In wartime, familiar spaces become hideouts, and lines of communication are fraught. In his durational performance for Neue Galerie Graz, Augustas Serapinas manipulates the context of the museum to direct attention at overlooked details. He creates palm-size openings in three museum walls, which serve as air vents and windows for small hiding places. For the duration of the performance, these are inhabited by museum personnel for whom the piece is named.

Visitors are asked to become messengers and runners between these three hideouts, delivering small personal objects from one room to the next, thus becoming part of a tenuous and fragile exchange between strangers like the kind that can happen when very different people are thrown together in wartime.

After the performance, the artist arranges these objects to become part of the exhibit in Neue Galerie Graz. Serapinas thus comments upon the infrastructures of the museum and how even the most basic cultural communications still continue in all their fragility during the catastrophe of war.

Augustas Serapinas (1990, Vilnius, Lithuania) is an artist whose sculptures and installations challenge preexisting understandings of the built landscape, exposing architectural elements, hidden histories, and concealed social relationships. He studies personal, anecdotal, and situational relationships to unearth the poetry of the everyday as an entry point into broader institutional workings. Serapinas’s work was recently included in the Toronto Biennial, RIBOCA2 Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art; the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); the Baltic Triennial 13, Vilnius; and Kunsthalle Wien. Solo exhibitions have been held at P/////AKT, Amsterdam; Emalin, London; Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia; Basement Roma; David Dale Gallery & Studios, Glasgow; Fogo Island Arts, NL; and City Salts, Birsfelden.

22.9., 18:30–21:00
23.9., 24.9., 25.9., 10:00–18:00


In multiple languages

Neue Galerie Graz
Joanneumsviertel and Neutorgasse 45 (historical entrance)
8010 Graz
♿ Venue accessible for wheelchairs

Admission included in museum ticket


Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’22