Born in 1966 in Melbourne, Australia, Danius Kesminas currently lives and works in Melbourne.
Read MoreKesminas takes a multi-disciplinary, collaborative approach to his art practice, developing projects which often incorporate music and satire to investigate issues around art and politics. Kesminas’ band The Histrionics has released two albums, Never Mind the Pollocks, we’re the Histrionics (2003) and Museum Fatigue (2005), they have performed throughout Australia and Europe, including at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The Histrionics is a Concept-Art-(Heritage)-Rock-Cover-Band. The band synthesizes the attributes of popular culture with the concerns of visual art discourse. Rock/Pop classics are animated by novel lyrics that re-contextualize each song within art world history, theory, controversy and rumour, presenting a unique combination of rock’n’roll, performance art, pedagogy and humour. The Histrionics perform in custom-made Jackson Pollock drip suits accompanied by videos made by Kesminas, as well as an overhead projector displaying the re-written lyrics karaoke style.
Kesminas’ recent band project PUNKASILA was formed on a residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in 2006 with a group of Indonesian artists. PUNKASILA play hand-crafted mahogany guitars that simulate hybrid M-16s/AK-47s and wear camouflage patterned hand-painted batik, tailored as military fatigues. The name, PUNKASILA, which literally means “punk principles”, derives from Pancasila, the five ideological tenets devised by Soekarno as propaganda to create a unitary basis of Indonesian nationhood. PUNKASILA has performed in Indonesia, Australia, and in 2009 at the Tenth Biennale of Havana, Cuba.
Kesminas is also part of the conceptual art music collective Slave Pianos along with Rohan Drape, Neil Kelly, David Nelson and Michael Stevenson.
