ART CITIES: Madrid-Pakui Hardware
Pakui Hardware is the name chosen by collaborative artist duo Neringa Černiauskaité and Ugnius Gelguda. Pakui Hardware refers to Pakui – special attendant of Hawaiian Goddess, a runner who could circle an island six times in a day, thus embodying velocity and mythology, and Hardware which stands for materiality, bodies, and resources.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: carlier|gebauer Gallery Archive
Pakui Hardware’s work explores plasticity of bodies, their yet undiscovered potentials. They trace how diverse technologies expand, test and control these bodily promises. Hybrid materials that the artists employ correspond to hybrid bodies that surround us. These questions are analyzed through such examples as invasive and transformative relationship to bodies, automation, synthetic biology and new materiality. By combining natural and manmade materials, sterile and organic forms, the artists merged design, biology and art history into hybrid and curious creatures immersed in their autonomous environments. Pakui Hardware’s signature aesthetics, wide theoretical network and material experiments create unexpected ecosystems and life-forms. Looking at the relationship between contemporary technology, economy and bodily transformations, over the last few years the duo’s lenses has focused on contemporary medicine and its diverse ways of altering, monitoring and fragmenting bodies. In their installations, Pakui Hardware redefine established boundaries of the natural and artificial in an attempt to reimagine a metamorphic body in constant becoming. Their first solo exhibition in Spain, “THE BURN” weaves together human and vegetal bodies, politics and medicine by presenting two new series of sculptures “Inflammation” (2023) and “Heat Treated” (2023). “Inflammation” is part of a larger body of sculptures that are currently on view in the solo installation under the same title at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. These spatial drawings made of casted aluminium, that carry ‘hot-spots’ of ‘inflammations’ made of glass, depict fragments of enlarged or recomposed human nervous systems. According to the authors of “Inflamed. Deep Medicine & the Anatomy of Injustice”, Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, inflammation is an ancient and natural bodily response to unhealthy conditions that are both contemporary and historical, created by oppression and trauma. Chronic inflammation is often the result of historical injustice as well as social and economic hardships that is being inscribed into the bodily memory overtime – often failed to recognize by a Western approach to medicine when treating the malfunctioning bodies. Works from the series “Heat Treated” tell of other painful and poorly healing burns evoked by giant Sosnowsky’s hogweed upon human and animal skin. All parts of Sosnowsky weed contain intense phototoxic allergen, thus even small drops of plant’s juice cause photosensitivy and watery blisters. The plant was once common only in the Caucasus area, but under Stalin’s rule it was started to be used as a fodder, which, due to the plant’s highly invasive character, allowed it to quickly spread in many areas of Ukraine, Russia, Poland and the Baltic States. A brute political decision created a form of botanical colonialism. The wall-based pieces resemble fossils from the future – yet to be uncovered – hiding imprints of Sosnowsky’s hogweed, medical instruments, pills and industrial materials, behind the surface. The surface which itself seems to still be in motion, hot lava of aluminum turned into a glowing metal skin.
Photo: Pakui Hardware, Courtesy the artists and carlier|gebauer Gallery
Info: carlier|gebauer Gallery, Calle de José Marañón 4, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 26/1-2/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.carliergebauer.com/
