Zilvinas Kempinas creates a monumental colonnade from lengths of videotape
Zilvinas Kempinas, Lithuania b.1969 / Columns 2006 (Installed in 'Worlds within Worlds', QAG 2026) / Magnetic tape, painted wood panels and nails / Purchased 2012 with funds from Tim Fairfax AM through the QAG Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Zilvinas Kempinas / Photograph: C Callistemon © QAGOMA / View full image
Columns 2006 is a group of tall, hollow cylinders made from lengths of unspooled magnetic videotape that extend from the floor to the ceiling, arranged in a grid formation. With the edge of the tape facing out towards the viewer, the columns are barely perceptible.
Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Kempinas’s installation of columns makes something monumental and abstract from an everyday material, the artist playing with the delicate quality of the tape against the monumental colonnade it constructs.
VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for analog video recording on tape cassettes. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 90s. / View full image
We invite you to walk through this forest of perfect cylinders as the columns shape-shift creating an optical illusion where the thickness of the tape seems to constantly change.
Discussing his interest in videotape, Kempinas has stated:
I am attracted to things that are capable of transcending their own banality and materiality to become something else, something more. I like the way that videotape is simultaneously delicate and durable, since it’s meant to last. I can rip it easily with my hands because it’s so thin, but I can also stretch it. Videotape is made to present the world in colour, but it appears purely black. It’s supposed to be this safe container of the past, but it is destined to vanish like a dinosaur, to become obsolete, pushed away by new technologies. It’s a familiar mass-produced commodity, but it can be surprisingly sensual and can look almost alive if set in motion. It can be seen as a solid, thick, black line, but it can also disappear right in front of your eyes if it’s turned on its side. So, to me, it’s not just VHS tape but a rich sculptural material. It allows me to achieve subtle perceptual effects, which I simply would not be able to achieve with steel, stone, or any other material.[1]
Zilvinas Kempinas, Lithuania b.1969 / Columns 2006 (Installed in 'Worlds within Worlds', QAG 2026) / Magnetic tape, painted wood panels and nails / Purchased 2012 with funds from Tim Fairfax AM through the QAG Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Zilvinas Kempinas / Photograph: J Ruckli © QAGOMA / View full image
On display in Worlds within Worlds
14 March – 16 August 2026
Queensland Art Gallery
Gallery 4
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
Brisbane, Australia
Endnotes
- ^ Veronika Roberts, ‘Interview with Zilvinas Kempinas’, Museo Magazine, 2008 [https://www.museomagazine.com/ZILVINAS-KEMPINAS]