This Summer we are presenting the first institutional solo exhibition in England by Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas featuring his large-scale sculptural installation, Physical Culture. Join Marta Marsicka, a curator, researcher, and art historian for a walkthrough of the exhibition.

Drawing on visual cultures from Central and Eastern Europe during the socialist and postsocialist period, Marta’s walkthrough will trace the intertwined histories of physical education, hygiene, and state-sponsored ideals of the body. From gymnasiums to studios, these contexts reveal how training, of both mind and body, has been structured, aestheticised, and politicised.

Positioned in dialogue with Augustas Serapinas’ gym-like installation, the walkthrough will consider how regimes of repetition, discipline, and self-improvement have operated across both artistic and athletic training, in art histories spanning Western and Eastern Europe.

The session will invite participants to think collectively about how bodies are shaped through education, and how these histories continue to resonate within contemporary artistic practice.

Marta Marsicka is a curator, researcher, and art historian based in the Midlands. Their practice engages with East-Central European identity, migration, care, and the politics of representation in post-Brexit Britain. They are Artist Development Coordinator at BACKLIT, Nottingham, and a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts London, where their Techne-funded research investigates the representation of Central and Eastern European women artists in British exhibitions after 1989. Their writing has been published in ArtMargins, JAWS: Journal of Arts and Writing, British UnCanon, among others. Marta is a co-founder of The Lilac House, a queer, feminist, and working-class curatorial counter-practice.