Shelter, 2024
site-specific installation
M-2 Building M, “Klaipėdos energija” site, Danės g. 8
Is there a shelter in the city? And where are the people? Here they are – in clusters, branches, roots, aphids, out of spectacles, paintings, screens, sunsets, panoramas, concerts, stadiums, meetings: eaters, listeners, passers-by, passengers. Here they are – a crowd marching past. Here they are, set down in rows instead of words. Faces that do not exist. Mutated faces. They try. They wait. They look for shelter. And here is a big face they are afraid of, but they like it. They swarm together into that one big face, and it takes them in. They become its eyebrows, its hair, its moustaches, its ears, its noses, its mouths.
In this site-specific installation in an abandoned industrial building on the grounds of the former Klaipėda power plant, Šarapova hints at the narrow line between the individual and the mass, people and the crowd, acceptance and hatred, manipulation and responsibility, hopes and reality, fear and brainwashing, safety and aggression – and at the fact that the myth of the “Saviour” can sometimes turn into a very dangerous thing.
Paulina Pukytė, Jurga Šarapova
Jurga Šarapova – an artist who employs a wide range of media in her work: drawing, painting, sewing, weaving, sculpture, installation, voice performance and text. All kinds of found objects, fabrics, clothes, soft toys, old books, tins and so on she reworks – meticulously, almost obsessively, yet with complete artistic freedom – into something entirely different: multi-layered, strange, beautiful, ugly, poetic, seemingly naive yet also cruel, parallel and constantly expanding worlds, which she densely populates with all manner of human-animal hybrids and through which she analyses human nature incisively and sensitively.