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.

Link

https://2022.steirischerherbst.at/en/program/artists/3665/augustas-serapinas