Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas (b. 1996, Chicago, USA) currently lives and works between Berlin and Vilnius. He participated in Artists' Film International (2024), was nominated for the CIRCA Prize (2023), and won the JCDecaux Prize (2021). In 2024, Meno Niša Gallery successfully presented the artist's work at international art fairs in Copenhagen and Antwerp.
Curator, art historian Povilas Gumbis:
"V. Aukščiūnas' artistic practice, encompassing the media of installation, sculpture, performance and film, is based on the methodological opposition of the latter two. The former is dominated by a directorial point of view, a tendency to control the material being formed. In the case of performance, the initial creative vision has to come to terms with the dynamism of the spatial spots, to accept the fact of the necessity of vulnerability. This tension becomes the result of queer temporality, an alternative rhythm of being, characterised by cycles, interruptions, pauses; or returns to the same creative motifs, endless recontextualisations of the details that make them up.
V. Aukščiūnas' case, it is physical intimacy, the search for transgressive sensations that unleash the body's range of possibilities for self-expression, allowing it to become whatever and whenever it (he) wants to be. The levitation between the directorial completeness and the openness of the act becomes the creative material that shapes the changing identities, relationships and imaginary of the passage of time."
