Vitalij Strigunkov (b. 1990) is an artist who lives and creates in Vilnius, Lithuania. He studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. While he studied painting, he now brings together a variety of media in his art. Strigunkov’s works combine appropriated images and stories, actions, drawings, video, and installations. In his creations, the artist explores the economy of symbolic capital and the emergence and disappearance of cultural value, creating contrasts with broader cultural, social, and political problems

Vitalij Strigunkov stands out on Lithuania’s contemporary art scene as a particularly analytical and reflective creator. The foundation of his works are often logical relationships or alogisms. The artist’s rational approach helps examine the makeup of diverse social and cultural structures, grasping the rules of how they function and the margin of error of those rules. Strigunkov’s attentive gaze on everyday reality, current events, and their setting make his creations timely, but not fleeting or quickly aging. Quite the opposite – the artist looks at the essence of processes and phenomena, where specific surnames, dates and locations become mere details. Found at the core of the works are continually reactualised temporary relationships and states, like waiting, being late, postponing, boredom, continuity and repetition, hurrying, planning, synchronisation, rhythmicity, and so on. Such conditions of condensed, stretched-out or standardised time become a distinctive creative methodology which the artist applies in nearly all his works, though it comes out especially clearly in A Year, a Few Months and Some More (2020), a project analysing intersections between the duration of copyright in intellectual property law alongside the processes of state-building, and in Waiting (2015), which was presented at the XII Baltic Triennial. The latter work shows a recording of a live television news broadcast where then U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who is being received at Vilnius Airport, never seems to exit the airplane. The artist appropriates the awkwardness and unpredictability of the drawn-out television coverage and transfers them to the exhibition space, reinforcing them with another Lithuanian voiceover and the strict schedule for broadcasting the report. In this and other works of Vitalij Strigunkov, there emerges a contrast between the rehearsed and the improvised, the planned and the random, together with subtle irony and slowly unfolding absurdity. 

Another of the artist’s key methods is appropriation. Strigunkov applies it as a primitive gesture of using a pencil to transfer to paper someone’s carvings on pews at a church in Torun for CCC (2018); and as an educational procedure in repainting classics of Lithuanian art in the work As if I couldn’t see, but could hear voices telling me about what I should see. (Winter landscape) (2013); and as more complex efforts to get involve in other artists’ projects. For instance, by maintaining the freshness of the lettuce in Giovanni Anselmo’s Struttura che mangia (1968) in his own work Caring (2019), or in his work Substitution (2015) by painting one more portrait of Fabiola for the collection kept by artist Francis Alÿs. These multi-layered projects of his combining diverse artistic disciplines also conceptually integrate Vitalij Strigunkov’s education in painting and drawing, and flirt with art history. But in his work, he does not stop at a single expression – the realization of projects is dictated by an idea and random occurrences. To immortalise and structure them, the artist often utilises video documentation, either appearing personally in the narratives captured by the camera or delegating assistants. 

But perhaps Vitalij Strigunkov’s most pronounced creative line is his examinations of value and symbolic capital, where the artist questions relationships of power, issues of productivity and senselessness, and strategies of accumulating value. Strigunkov’s critique of the art system also transforms his own creative work into a self-critical act wherein he tries to find his coordinates as an artist and determine the value of his work. 

By Jogintė Bučinskaitė