Kęstutis Svirnelis
Exhibition “Digital Soul”
2025.06.26 – 07.26.
Venue: Titanikas Exhibition Halls of the Vilnius Academy of Arts

Tender Malfunctions – On the Phantom Logics of Kęstutis Svirnelis
by the exhibition curator, Polish writer, researcher, and curator Krzysztof Gutfrański

Kęstutis Svirnelis is, above all, a practical dreamer—an artist who navigates the terrain of the unexpected with the hands of a builder and the eyes of a poet. While his sculptures often arise from found materials and the logic of objet trouvé, they reveal a precision and deliberateness that’s far from accidental. Beneath their DIY surfaces and ironic humor lies a quiet homage to Baltic craftsmanship—disciplined, unpretentious—and a tongue-in-cheek nod to his long-standing life in Stuttgart, where the ghost of German engineering haunts even his most whimsical contraptions.

This new exhibition, Digital soul at Titanikas Gallery in Vilnius presents the most comprehensive look at his evolving practice to date, bringing together older and newer works that chart his enduring fascination with motion, failure, and the uneasy entanglement between bodies, machines, and the myths of artificial intelligence.

We first met at the start of the pandemic, when I found myself stranded at an art residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kęstutis—then working as an external producer—offered both technical help and a dose of warm hospitality. I was struck not only by his generosity but by the curious fact that a Lithuanian artist had learned Polish in Germany, speaking it with unexpected ease. From that moment, our conversations stretched across machines, geopolitics, life hacks, and artificial intelligence. What stood out was his deep scepticism—pragmatic rather than romantic—toward the kind of technological power fueling both computation and warfare.

Although thoroughly skilled in machinery, Kęstutis viewed its growing dominance with a sense of unease that, in hindsight, feels almost prophetic. Since then, the AI explosion has radically reshaped the cultural landscape—not merely threatening creative labor but drawing artists and everyone else into complex webs of algorithmic dependency, extraction, and surveillance.

We crossed paths again, almost by chance, three years later in Vilnius—a special place for both of us. Kęstutis was packing up an exhibition and preparing an artistic residency container near the city. I was on an altogether different mission: investigating the missing brain—cut into wafer-thin slices—of Józef Piłsudski. Our meeting led us to Zervynos, the remote village near Belarusian border, where Kęstutis grew up and where his family had long worked with timber, both practically and creatively. The road there winds through dense forests, past hollowed trees repurposed as beehives, hidden ponds, and quiet, nearly deserted clearings. Zervynos itself—both heritage park, an objet trouvé and a seasonal retreat—embodies a distinctive Baltic minimalism, where architecture and design reflect a deeply functional beauty of the village’s surroundings. This context offers insight into Kęstutis’ creations: kinetic sculptures that exist in the tension between the organic and mechanical, the performative and systematic, the remembered and the newly invented.

Artificial intelligence promises frictionless systems and seamless surfaces—an architecture of control disguised as convenience, and a tool of reeducation masked as new know-how. In contrast, Kęstutis Svirnelis builds things that don’t quite behave—objects that interrupt expectation, challenge perception, and resist the tidy logics of computation. His kinetic sculptures stutter, sway, or grind into action, like forgotten organs of extinct machines or phantom limbs caught in perpetual rehearsal. They move with no clear utility, as if desire—not code—were their driving force. There’s something sensual, even conspiratorial in their gestures, reminiscent of Jan Švankmajer’s libidinal automata, as well as cosmic visions of Čiurlionis—where function dissolves into suggestion, and suggestion collapses into play. What AI strives to erase—error, noise, confusion—his machines preserve with care. They are imperfect, fallible, inflated and stubbornly embodied; and in that, they offer a quiet critique of intelligence as simulation, proposing instead a poetics of malfunction.

This exhibition at Titanikas is not just a survey of works—it’s a chance to experience how sculpture can think with its body, hesitate with its limbs, or malfunction with intent. Kęstutis Svirnelis builds with remnants, yet what emerges is never merely assembled—it’s lived, tested, and strangely alive. His mobiles and kinetic sculptures do not predict the future, but stall it; they do not automate movement, but complicate it. Somewhere between craft and intuition, accident and structure, his practice invites us to reimagine intelligence not as domination over matter, but as an act of attentiveness—where we are no longer passive recipients of design or code, but co-inventors in a world that still resists prediction.