Pakui Hardware mdbk leipzig Ugnius Gelguda Neringa Černiauskaite 2019 underbelly

Pakui Hardware, the name of the artistic duo Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda, formed in 2014, was coined by curator Alex Ross (NY). This name is a reference to Pakui – a runner and the attendant of the Hawaiian goddess Haumea, who could circle the island of Oahu six times in the span of a single day. Pakui Hardware represents the friction between high-speed technological development, the technological expansion of biotech capitalism, and the material limitations of this development. 

Since 2014, Pakui Hardware has traced Capital, which travels through bodies and materials, by highlighting the friction between the velocity of technological and scientific development and the materiality which resists and distorts this ‘progress’. Their sculptural installation, ‘Extrakorporal’ (2018 onwards) brings to the centre of our attention body organs, grown and cultivated outside of human bodies, within the practices of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Certain animal species, such as sea urchins and jellyfish, themselves possess this regenerative potential. The duo is interested not only in the regenerative potential of these practices, but also in bio-capitalism that profits from the medical augmentation and modification of the human form. In their project ‘On Demand’ (2017), the duo addresses this topic with the help of ambiguous images, printed on heat-treated PVC surfaces, and found industrial objects, by creating body-like structures which may take on human shape, as well as the shapes of sea animals or hybrid technologized creatures. These bodies, resulting from the artists’ experiments with natural and synthetic materials, are only some of the elements included in the duo’s installations, which function as closed micro-ecosystems, at once both engaging and uncomfortable. In their project ‘Hesitant Hand’ (2017), an industrial robot creates its own spatial and constantly changing display of objects specially designed for this exhibition. Both the audience and the artists themselves become mere observers of the choreographic movements of the robot. In ‘Creatures of Habit’ (2017), bodies resembling the shapes of industrial robots are covered with stretched over uniforms. Machine and human features as well as gestures merge in these covered bodies – an as-yet unfamiliar, transitory species emerges. 

Neringa Černiauskaitė is an artist, curator, and writer. In 2014, she graduated with an MA from the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies in New York. Ugnius Gelguda holds a postgraduate art degree from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Pakui Hardware has held solo shows at mumok – Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (the UK), carlier | gebauer gallery in Berlin, Tenderpixel in London, Bielefelder Kunstverein in Germany, SIC project space in Helsinki, the Trafó House of Contemporary Arts in Budapest, Artissima Art Fair in Turin, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, and elsewhere. The duo have participated in group shows at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the 13th Baltic Triennial (2018), Kunsthalle in Basel, Kunstverein Braunschweig and Kunstverein Freiburg in Germany, the 20th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil in São Paulo, Assembly Point in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius. 

Pakui Hardware to represent Lithuania at 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.

www.pakuihardware.org 

The duo is represented by carlier | gebauer gallery (Berlin): www.carliergebauer.com.