unning alongside Midori Mitamura’s stunning series of shifting domestic installations and breakfast gatherings and a succinct exhibition of works from the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) collection, Danius Kesminas’s suite of projects might appear a tad convoluted at first glance.

A vodka still and automated PVC pipe organ that plays the traditional Lithuanian drinking song Gerkit Gerkit, Broliukai (Drink Brothers, Drink); an installation of revolutionary murals; AK-47 shaped guitars; lo-fi video works and the odd performance by an Indonesian concept punk band; and a self-playing grand piano perched on a giant electric chair and controlled via an audience-operated computer console: the uninitiated could hardly be blamed for evacuating the building in a bewildered terror. But there’s a disarming coherence to these incredibly intricate, painstakingly conceptualised and engineered works – a kind of collaborative bind.

Indeed, it’s a sensibility that emanates from Kesminas’s Pipeline to Oblivion project with every blocky note puffed from the PVC pipe organ. It takes its cues from a myriad of narratives surrounding Lithuania’s independence from the former USSR, Eastern Europe’s alcoholism epidemic and an illegal series of underground pipelines pumping black market vodka or “moonshine” across the border to Lithuania from neighbouring Belarus.

Kesminas’s organ effectively snuffs the process. By utilising the vodka distillation process to power the organ’s Lithuanian drinking hymn, he subverts the drink’s devilish effects. The binding power of song – the same social glue that helped facilitate Lithuania’s “singing revolution” and eventuated in the country’s successful pro-democracy movement – is re-enabled and re-activated.

In the adjoining space, a very different kind of collaborative musical creation hammers out its distortion-prone, luridly coloured attack. Punkasila (which translates to “punk principles”) are a Yogyakarta “post-disaster” punk band who play hand-carved AK-47- and M16-shaped guitars. Formed by Kesminas whilst undertaking a residency in the city during 2006, the band represents a mash-up of traditional and post-Suharto Indonesian ideologies, politics and iconography. The space is garnered with giant, revolutionary murals and posters depicting the band in a kind of heroic stance. Their guitar weaponry perch on mechanised tripods, swinging about the room, ready to unleash a wave of distortion on anything that moves. Video works and an interactive music box take the place of fold back monitors; waves of sonic and visual noise pre-empt a diverse, playful, empowered new Indonesia.

In the third space, the latest incarnation of Keminas’s longstanding Slave Pianos project – which sees avant-garde sound works by visual artists reconfigured into the classical form – consists of an automated grand piano positioned atop a gigantic electric chair. Audience members can then control the piano by selecting a composition via an adjoining computer consol. On selecting an artist to be “executed”, a mechanical plotter with video screen moves across a wall-mounted world map, landing on a point of geo-political relevance to the artist. It’s a kind of arcane, hilarious and slightly sinister surveillance process. Artists are selected, tracked and musically executed.

That said, what’s most striking about Kesminas’s selected projects is their very collectivity. Indeed, ultimately, these works seem to preface the power and potential of community. Though inherently complex – even convoluted – in their sprawling forms, justifications and artistic and political logic, these are works that have been built from the ground up.

Be it an Indonesian punk militia or a swathe of artists willing to be executed, the catalyst for each of these projects is a convergence – or at least a consideration – of many heads, hearts and hands.

Slave Pianos | Punkasila | Pipeline to Oblivion runs until July 23 at Monash University Museum of Art.

monash.edu.au/muma