Inflammation

Artists

Pakui Hardware

Press release

National Participation - Lithuania

Thematically, the new large-scale exhibition by Pakui Hardware, Inflammation, speaks of the fevers of humanity and the world, of the “flaming” bodies of the planet and of our own. The artists drew inspiration from Marya Rupa and Raj Patel’s book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, which uses the concept of inflammation as a metaphor for the systemic harms being inflicted on both humanity and the planet. Inflammation, according to the authors, is the body’s normal response to toxic conditions, and the first thing to be “treated” are not the individual unhealthy organs, but the very systems – economic or social – that make these chronic ailments be passed on from one generation to the next. Both the book and the exhibition connect the human and the planetary scales: not only our body, but also that of the planet is aflame. Another important line of the book, which has also been present and evolving in Pakui Hardware’s work in recent years, is the act of questioning the cosmology of the Western world, characterised by a constant fragmentation or separation – of the mind from the body, of the human from nature, of what is considered “own” from what belongs to the realm of the “other”. In the exhibition, these separations melt and merge into one mixed speculative organism that connects architecture with nature, the Mesozoic with the contemporary, the human with technology, plastic with soil.

Preparing a solo exhibition in Lithuania after a long break, the Pakui Hardware collective will represent Lithuania at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024 together with Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė (1933-2007). This exhibition is an introduction to the future pavilion.

Commissioner: Arūnas Gelūnas
Curator: Valentinas Klimašauskas
Exhibition Environment and Landscape Architects: Išora x Lozuraitytė studio (Petras Išora-Lozuraitis and Ona Lozuraitytė-Išorė)
Project Coordinator: Evaldas Stankevičius
Light Artist: Eugenijus Sabaliauskas
Design: Vytautas Volbekas