Pakui Hardware. Vanilla Eyes

Since 2014, Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda have been operating together as an artist duo under the label Pakui Hardware. This name derives from Pakui, the extremely quick servant of the Hawaiian fertility goddess Haumea. Legend has it that the children of the goddess were all born from different parts of her body, while Pakui is known for being able to circle the Hawaiian island of Oahu six times in just one day. The fertility symbolism of this myth, based on fragmentation and acceleration, is Pakui Hardware’s point of reference for an exploration of a contemporary social dynamic of the body based on technological innovations. Every day on Wall Street endless rows of numbers flicker across the television and computer screens. They transform the flow of capital into purely virtual transactions, while mobile technologies in all fields of our lives are creating new high-tech sensations in record time. This is a reality shaped by virtualization and by dematerialized visions of the future, beneath which the two artists reveal the tangible uncanny and unpredictable effects.

In their first solo exhibition in a museum in Austria, Pakui Hardware transform the exhibition gallery into an incubator for still unknown (hybrid) beings of the future. This is all inspired by the 1970s science fiction film The Andromeda Strain, and by synthetic biology’s potential to create artificial organisms, leading to a scenario of possible new lifeforms and lifestyles. 

Exhibition architecture: Petras Išora & Ona Lozuraitytė
Exhibition design: Vytautas Volbekas

Kindly supported by Vilniaus universitetas.