On Thursday, 20 August 2026, at 6.30 pm, the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) Reading Room will host a conversation between Rodrigo Hernández and Saskia Fischer, artists featured in ‘Superglue, or Inventing the Friend’, and the exhibition’s curator, Valentinas Klimašauskas.
The discussion will introduce the artists’ individual practices and explore the theoretical, technological and cultural conditions that have contributed to the renewed prominence of figurative art in recent years.
Figurative art has existed for at least 50,000 years. The oldest known examples are currently believed to be cave paintings discovered in the Indonesian archipelago, depicting three human figures and a wild pig.
The boom in figurative art can be understood as a response to the uncertainty and disinformation accompanying the growing dominance of digital technologies, as well as to an age of excess speculation, simulation, hyperreality and big data. It can also be seen as an attempt to harness the possibilities offered by posthumanism, new materialisms, postcolonial perspectives, post-robotics, artificial intelligence and other contemporary developments.
In the context of ‘Superglue, or Inventing the Friend’, the conversation will explore how the return of figuration opens up possibilities for encountering the other: through different conceptions of otherness, the emergence of posthuman(ist) figures, and understandings of contemporary art as something ultimately unknowable and alien.
The conversation will be held in English.
Admission is free and open to all.
RODRIGO HERNÁNDEZ (born in Mexico City, MX) lives and works in Paris. Hernández’s highly idiosyncratic visual vocabulary invites, much like fiction, the suspension of belief and the adoption of imaginative perception. Each of his installations is constructed as a rebus of diverse sources, including poetry, philosophy, narrative and dreams. The myriad historical and aesthetic references in his work serve not as statements in themselves, but as experiments in synthesis, inviting viewers to navigate a cosmos of possibilities. Hernández’s paintings, reliefs, sculptures and installations operate like machines for flexing the imagination, triggering encounters between imagery and meaning-making, and between forms and their environments.
Rodrigo studied at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht after completing a BA at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe.
SASKIA FISCHER (born in Stuttgart, DE; lives and works between Vilnius, LT and Stuttgart ,DE) is an artist working across film, sculpture, performance, and interventions in public space.
Her work tests how identity and landscape are intertwined and codependent. Natural and built environments appear as stage, archive, and resonant space, where individual and collective inscriptions become visible. Architecture and queer-feminism are central points of reference in her practice, particularly in relation to the visibility of marginalised bodies and voices within the built environment. Using fiction alongside physical materials such as glass and light, Saskia creates sculptural scenarios and cinematic stagings that approach landscape as a dynamic field of transitions and frictions.
Saskia studied photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts (Essen, DE), and glass, sculpture, and installation at the Estonian Academy of Arts (Tallinn, EE). She completed an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London (UK), and most recently held a Weissenhof Fellowship at the State Academy of Fine Arts (Stuttgart, DE), where she also taught as a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts.
VALENTINAS KLIMAŠAUSKAS – director of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), curator, and writer.
Among his major international projects are: the 1st Klaipėda Biennial ‘Sunset Every Two Years”’(2025); the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with João Laia; artists: Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė; Lithuanian National Museum of Art, 2024); the contemporary art festival ‘Coast Contemporary’ in the Lofoten Islands, Norway (2023); the 14th Baltic Triennial ‘The Endless Battle’ (co-curated with João Laia, CAC Vilnius, 2021); a choreographic project by Alexandra Pirici at the Ninth Fort Memorial in Kaunas (2020); and the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with Inga Lāce; Daiga Grantina’s solo exhibition ‘Saules Suns’, 2019).
Photography and/or filming may take place at the event, so please be informed that you may be seen in photos and/or videos of the event. These photos and videos can be published on social networks or media.