Emalin
Frieze London 2016

Jõusaal (gym) restages a work Serapinas initially conceived in residence at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia. During this time, the artist came across a number of abandoned sculptures, relinquished and left behind by Fine Arts students. Reflecting on the Academy’s isolation from its surrounding environment - which included athletic training sites used in preparation for the 2012 Olympics - Serapinas revitalized the discarded works by constructing a gym within the Academy’s parameters. At Frieze London, Serapinas’ gym is once again brought to life. Local Londoners are invited to make use of Jõusaal as they would their regular gyms. All equipment utilized here has been recreated from memory and interrogates the possibility of applying novel functions to the notion of the artwork previously made redundant.

Augustas Serapinas’ practice is invested in recomposing socially engaged spaces in order to foreground and problematize the assumptions that shape them. By inverting the customary functions of objects and spatiality, Serapinas toys with the possibilities of the encounter - with art and with the social relations it engenders, as a phenomenon and an opportunity. Augustas Serapinas was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1990, and he lives and works in Vilnius. He attended the Rupert Educational Program in Vilnius, LT (2014) and completed a BA Fine Arts from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Vilnius, LT (2013) and The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, DK (2013). Recent exhibitions include Dusting the Grounds, David Roberts Art Foundation (London, UK - 2016); Philip, Lukas & Isidora, SALTS (Basel, CH - 2015); Double Bind, Rupert (Vilnius, LT - 2015); 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, (Moscow, RU - 2015) and The Future of Memory. An Exhibition on the Infinity of the Present Time, Kunsthalle Wien, (Vienna, AU - 2015)