ACOUSTIC DENSITY

On Thursday, October 22, at 18:00, the exhibition Acoustic Density by Arturas Bumšteinas, Elena Laurinavičiūtė and Alessandro Perini, curated by Agnė Jonkutė, opens at gallery (AV17). The exhibition is organised by Pamėnkalnio Gallery in collaboration with its project partner, gallery (AV17).

The exhibition presents three artists’ approaches to sound and form. Here, sound becomes visible, tangible or completely silenced. The exhibition’s trajectories are marked by different states: cast sound, melted and embedded sound, visible sound and sound set in motion.

Arturas Bumšteinas (born 1982 in Vilnius) is a composer and creator of experimental music and sound installations that combine forms of expression from theatre and radio art. The artist returns to the gallery with his own cast vinyl records. The sound heard in this space in the 2020 exhibition Goldberg Variations (together with Gytis Bertulis) takes on the form of a unique object this time. Sound returns as a physical artefact.

Elena Laurinavičiūtė (born 1993 in Anykščiai) creates sound-based works, sounding ceramics, aerophones and installations. In Elena’s work, the tactile gesture is essential both to shaping matter and to hearing it. Objects made of fired clay are set in motion, allowing air to enter and produce sound. Sound becomes a meeting of four elements: earth, air, water and movement.

Alessandro Perini (born 1983 in Cantù, Italy) is a composer, sound artist and installation creator who explores the interaction between acoustic instruments, electronics and mechanical objects of his own design. The synthetic low-frequency vibrations he creates are transmitted to eight contact transducers, each attached to a water-filled vessel. As the vessels vibrate, the water’s surface is set in motion, and light makes this movement visible. The result is a directly interconnected sound-and-image system.

The exhibition Acoustic Density is presented as part of Laconica, an ongoing programme developed by Pamėnkalnio Gallery. Laconica was conceived as a platform for artists who explore the possibilities of minimalist expression in their work. The project takes a broad view of minimalism, extending beyond the tradition that emerged in the 1960s and seeking its characteristic principles of thought in contemporary artistic practices. These include the capacity of an idea and form to convey meaning, the conditional nature of narrative, economy of means, criticism of excess and the ecology of thought.

Previous Laconica events explored the connections between monochrome art and minimalist poetry (2021) and investigated the field of colour and olfactory phenomena (2023). The third edition of Laconica invites audiences to focus on sound – a counterpoint to silence and pauses, and a carrier of immaterial experience. In the project, sound becomes a conceptual layer of artistic language connecting music, visual art and interdisciplinary practices.

Organiser: Pamėnkalnio Gallery
Partner: Gallery (AV17)

Project initiator and artistic director: Kotryna Džilavjan
Exhibition curator: Agnė Jonkutė
Graphic design: Jurgita Juodytė
Exhibition architect: Danas Aleksa
Lighting consultant: Ignas Stankus

The exhibition is funded by: the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality, Konstnärsnämnden and the Lithuanian Artists’ Association.