Augustas Serapinas. Chair for the Invigilator | Art City 2026 Special Project

From 5 to 27 February 2026, the Fondazione Federico Zeri hosts Chair for the Invigilator by Augustas Serapinas.

Augustas Serapinas examines the ways in which we inhabit spaces and the symbolic hierarchies invested in them. Often adopting a site-specific and relational approach, the artist intervenes in the physicality of objects to alter their functions and uses, to play with their emotional charge, and to bring hidden meanings to the surface. His works engage with vernacular architectures, institutions, canons, and educational systems, revealing points of contact between history, personal experience, collective practices, and cultural critique.

Chair for the Invigilator is a series first presented in 2019 at the 58th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. The sculptures are seating structures inspired by lifeguard towers or tennis umpires’ chairs, raised approximately two meters above the floor and accessible by a ladder. Their elevated position creates a privileged vantage point that allows supervision of the space from above. At the same time, the bodies occupying them temporarily detach from the surrounding context and become highly visible to others. The sculptures were originally conceived for cultural mediators, with the aim of making their presence within the exhibition space explicit.

The intervention reconfigured the way the exhibition was experienced and drew public attention to professional roles that are often overlooked or taken for granted. The chairs also provided a service for the mediators, allowing them to rest during long shifts in which they are generally required to stand.

On the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2026, some of these seats are presented with a new function made available to the public. The sculptures are reintroduced as reading stations in the library of the Fondazione Federico Zeri, which houses a rich collection of art catalogues and books. Visitors are invited to choose a book and take it with them to the top of the structure, adopting a new posture that departs from the usual one of reading while bent over a desk with one’s gaze lowered.

Serapinas’s chairs frame and foreground the act of reading—and thus the acquisition of knowledge—in an intimate relationship with physical experience. From an elevated vantage point, the eye can encompass not only the pages of the book but also the surrounding environment. The assimilation of a book’s contents becomes inseparable from the concrete moment of reading, and thought reveals its grounding in the material reality of bodies. As often happens in the artist’s work, the pieces do not function merely as metaphors, but are activated to alter the perception of a specific audience.

Chair for the Invigilator is part of the program Lithuanian Culture in Italy 2025–2026. The Lithuanian Culture in Italy 2025–2026 program is organized by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania to the Italian Republic.
Thanks to APALAZZOGALLERY, Brescia, and Palazzo Bentivoglio, Bologna, for the loan of the exhibited works.