The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is pleased to present Final Projects: Group L, featuring works by Emilija Škarnulytė, Julia Obleitner, Helvijs Savickis, and Manuel Gorkiewicz. This exhibition marks the culmination of the fiftieth iteration of the Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program at the Mackey Apartments.
The six-month residency welcomes international artists working at the intersection of architecture and visual culture to live and work in Los Angeles. The residency culminates in a final group project presentation at the Mackey Apartments Garage Top. Initiated in October 1995, this unique program is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture in cooperation with the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna.
MANUEL GORKIEWICZ
Manuel Gorkiewicz’s final project takes the form of a film, “Gregarious Beasts” in which audio, location and camera technique represent a certain era in terms of environmental planning and architectural history. Gorkiewicz explores the “Beverly Hills Civic Center” in Los Angeles, planned by Charles W. Moore in the early 1980s, as a typical example of American postmodern architecture. The film is shot on a bodycam carried by a sportsperson by moving through the location in “parkour” style - a contemporary sport where a certain urban environment is explored acrobatically by the individual moves of the performer. The film’s unfolding of postmodern architectural history through serious and strategic “play” is complemented by voiceover excerpts from the book “The Heart of our Cities“ (1964) by the Austro-American architect Victor Gruen. These elements of audio type, location choice, and camera technique fuse into a film about current developments during the transformation of urbanity through media related developments, its relations to previous decades and the discrepancies between European and American ideas about public space in general.
JULIA OBLEITNER & HELVIJS SAVICKIS
Julia Obleitner and Helvijs Savickis’ collaboration started with a combined interest in weather systems, climate, and weather modification in Los Angeles and California - where water is limited due to the lack of reliable rain during the dry season. Savickis and Obleitner’s video work documents their route following the infrastructural path of the city’s water supply. They take a closer look at the weather modification program as part of California’s water supply system and infrastructures for the city, including: the Los Angeles aqueduct to reservoirs, hot springs, lakes and cloud seeding stations. “Cloud seeding” is a type of weather modification performed in order to control precipitation and to increase the efficiency of targeted rainfall towards multiple water reservoirs. It is estimated that weather modification operations can increase rainfall by 10 to 30 percent in a clear atmosphere. Devices that are enhancing rainfall vary from size, shape and appearance. These objects are hidden from public consciousness, installed as close to clouds as possible. The Owens Valley and the cloud seeding stations in the Sierra Nevada mountains represent traces of the most productive and controversial water systems in the world. By combining documenting material and digital created material – their work oscillates between history, new narratives, speculative fiction, human and environment. It is a journey to the city’s future weather, which tells a story of ecology, resources, the weather and the water.
EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ
Emilija Škarnulytė works between documentary and the imaginary. For final projects, she will present films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Her blind grandmother gently touches the weathered statue of a Soviet dictator. Neutrino detectors and particular colliders measure the cosmos with otherworldly architecture. Post-human species swim through submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle and crawl through tectonic fault lines in the Middle Eastern desert. In her recent work she’s explored the toxic remnants of the Soviet Union and the million year curse of its nuclear waste through a cinematic meditation on the dismantling of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania, a sister to the plant in Chernobyl that melted down in 1986. While in Los Angeles, Škarnulytė has continued her ongoing research using photogrammetry and underwater lidar remote sensing to picture what was lost beneath on the bottoms of the oceans, rivers, and lakes, what scars and stains humans deposit. But given the recent invasion of Ukraine, including the occupation of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the shelling of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant by the Russian military, Škarnulytė wishes to revisit this work through an installation and performance in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Her installation includes a photograph of the practice control room of the Ignalina NPP, a python slithering menacingly over its buttons. And in collaboration with her fellow residents, drifts of yellow and blue confetti, the colors of the Ukrainian flag, will cover the gallery floor in honor of those defending their homeland. During the opening reception, Škarnulytė will conduct a sound performance meditating on the nature of time and the mythologies that hide there.
Please visit our Residency page for more information about the residents.
MANUEL GORKIEWICZ
Gregarious Beasts, 2022
JULIA OBLEITNER & HELVIJS SAVICKIS
EMILIJA ŠKARNULYTĖ
The Artists & Architects-in-Residence Program is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture in cooperation with the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna.
Images: Tag Christof, 2022.