Zapraszamy na wernisaż wystawy "781 km"
16 listopada, godz. 17:00
Wspólna wystawa fotografii Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Wilnie oraz Instytutu Artystycznego w Poznaniu.
Kuratorzy wystawy: Andrzej P. Florkowski i Alvydas Lukys
Autorzy:
LT
Akvilė Anglickaitė
Arnas Anskaitis
Ieva Bernotaitė
Dovilė Budreikaitė-Dagienė
Joana Deltuvaitė
Lina Kynaitė
Lina Kruopytė
Miglė Narbutaitė
Robertas Narkus
Lina Praudzinskaitė
Kristina Sinkevičiūtė
Rūta Songailaitė
Artūras Valiauga
Milda Zabarauskaitė
PL
Dorota Boruń
Michał Bugalski
Mateusz Drabent
Anna Kędziora
Paweł Piekarski
Milena Kowalska
Agnieszka Kula
Diana Lelonek
Adam Pluciński
Weronika Trojanowska
Monika Walczak
Agata Witkowska
Kamil Wnuk
Paweł Żukowski
Notes on Photographic Works from the Vilnius Academy of Arts
Vytautas Michelkevičius
Pre-History
Lithuanian photography has been known among neighbours and worldwide because of the humanist photography of the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called Lithuanian School of Photography. Its main characteristics were reportage, a documentary approach and lyricism, ethnographic and humanist subjects. In the 1980s, a younger generation of photographers opposed the values of humanist photography as well as the totalitarian system by focusing on the banal environment of the Soviet city and emphasising monotony, the slowing of time and emptiness. This movement was called “the aesthetics of the boredom” by art critic Agnė Narušytė who defended her PhD thesis on the topic . In the end of 1980s, the youngest artists of this generation, Alvydas Lukys, Gintautas Trimakas and others started to use a conceptual approach in their photography, thus becoming artists using photography rather than photographers.
The aforementioned period in Lithuanian photography is rather clear, its prevalent approaches have been identified, the most important photographs have been published and the names have been indexed. The last two decades have been the most vivid and shifting though. Due to the political, economical and socio-cultural turning-points, the system of art and photography inherited from the Soviet period has collapsed or lost its power and the field became open to influences from Western Europe. The dominant discourse of fine art and documentary photography has exploded into very different uses of photography with various intentions.
History
The generation of young photographers with a conceptual approach to the medium, Alvydas Lukys, Gitautas Trimakas, Saulius Paukštys togetherwith the video artist Gintaras Šeputis and others, started to work at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and finally succeeded in establishing the Department of Photography and Video Art in 1997. Having realised that the department was working with much more than these two mediums, it was renamed as the Department of Photography and Media Art in 2000. Currently, postgraduates from the first (Jurgita Remeikytė and Irma Stanaitytė) and later (Vaclovas Nevčesauskas, Andrius Rugys and Laura Stasiulytė) generation of students form the basis of the teaching staff at the department.
My colleagues and I have recently discussed whether it was possible to name the teaching methodology and students’ works coming from the department as a specific school. Yet we were not able to identify common characteristics neither in their style nor in the topics and issues that these works represented. If it is possible to name the philosophy of teaching as a certain school, now is the right time to try to define it.
The approach to teaching photography is very broad at the department. For sure, there are almost no individual professors’ classes or so-called master classes in photography. Rather it is more like a collective class (for bringing up artists) with different approaches, coming from all the professors into a productive dialogue. The goal of the curriculum is to introduce the basics of media art (i.e. photography, video art, sound art, etc.) so that the students could later choose the appropriate medium to convey their artistic ideas. Besides photography and video art, students in the third year can choose the interdisciplinary art class led by the artist Artūras Raila. Moreover, they can choose a lot of complimentary subjects like sound art, multimedia, interactive media, etc.
The department is mostly interested in artists using photography and other media than in limited approaches of (fine) art photography. Therefore, the final works of the students are to be evaluated in broader contemporary and interdisciplinary art contexts.
Now-History
The range of approaches that students are using to work with photography is very surprising: from very material rethinking of photography to a very immaterial treatment of picture making. The former can be seen in Lina Praudzinskaitė’s work where she makes a sheet of paper out of her recycled pictures. In this creative act, the artist turns her unnecessary and unsuccessful photos into artworks in order to save them somehow.
The work by Arnas Anskaitis is both conceptual and heavily physical because it investigates how it is possible to take out an exact square meter of the gallery wall and transfer it to another place by the means of photography. At the same time, he questions whether it is possible to transport the so-called ‘aura’ of a specific art space.
For example, Arturas Valiauga represents quite a different approach to photography. He has been working mostly as a commercial photographer and, from time to time, he is commissioned for social photography projects. After gaining some experience, he entered the department’s MA programme in order to reflect on his own photographic practice and he did quite extensive research on how social projects influence the photographer’s creativity.
Lina Kruopytė does not pretend at all that she likes taking pictures. In her own artistic practice, she prefers conceptuality to visuality, whereas in her project Misspell she is playing with the power of the image to deceive. She exploits famous brands and starts creating new works by using the method of mistake. Ieva Bernotaitė also uses the strategy of appropriation. She takes the paintings by the famous painters (Bosch, Cranach, Klimt and Masaccio) throughout art history and researches the iconological representation of Eve (which stands for ‘Ieva’ in Lithuanian). The artist is very curious and deeply involved in looking at these paintings and in the end, she inserts her own body into them in order to re-identify herself.
The next quite important topic in students’ works is the issue of identity. Although very few artists are working with performance, Miglė Narbutaitė’s Nude Portraits are exceptional here not only because of this but also because she is performing with her own body. The performance had happened accidentally when she arrived to the United Arab Emirates, but her luggage was lost. To understand herself in the new situation, she took out her camera. Yet when somebody approaches this series without knowing the story, they suddenly feel like caught by the sight of a woman from Jeff Wall’s photograph Picture for Women (1979). For instance, Dovilė Budreikaitė and Joana Deltuvaitė are investigating issues of identity in quite a different manner. Both of them are documenting traces of time in relation to human beings. In her series Portraits, Dovilė Budreikaitė presents the naked appearance of reality, i.e. shoes of Lithuanian artists, while Joana Deltuvaitė makes close-ups of the traces left by the body in bathrooms, i.e. hair and body liquids. Both series attempt to depict the intimate relation between the human being and things. Akvilė Anglickaitė also reflects on the topic of identity in her documentary series in which she represents teenagers who have changed their gender.
Kristina Sinkevičiūtė, Rūta Songailaitė and Lina Kynaitė are working with specific photographic technologies in order to achieve unique aesthetics of the pictures. Manual work with the technologies and the fine-drawn aesthetics of the images shows a very personal approach to photography. Moreover, these specific technologies exceed the concept of photography and should be seen in the context of expanded photography. This is why these works could not be described as photography anymore, but as photographic art.
Finally, a collective work by Robertas Narkus & Milda Zabarauskaitė shows how photography could be placed in a specific space and transform it. The interdisciplinary and sculptural aspects of photography are also a well-liked strategy of the teaching curriculum at the department. The curtain, made of wedding pictures shot in the studios of the 1980s, has filled in the whole space of the old Vilnius Photography Gallery and transformed it into a photography studio of that time. Real-size figures were meeting new partners every time when the folds of the curtain were rearranged.
To cut a long story short, photography is used at the Photography and Media Art Department in a huge variety of ways because of the very interdisciplinary and inter-media approach to the medium which is taught by practising contemporary artists and curators. Sometimes photography is pushed to its boundaries, sometimes it is reconstructed by technological means, sometimes it is placed in the broader history of visual culture and finally, sometimes it is treated as a method for self-therapy.
Vytautas Michelkevičius has been a lecturer at the Photography and Media Art Department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts since 2005. He used to be an artist, but now he mainly works as a curator, critic and publisher. He has edited and co-edited five books on photography and media art. In 2010, he defended his PhD thesis on Lithuanian photography in the 1960s – 1980s.
Andrzej P. Florkowski
781 km exhibition - the initiative of the House Polish Culture in Vilnius - is the first undertaking in the field of photography involving both Academy of Fine Arts in Vilnius and University of Arts in Poznań. Students working with the photography medium from both schools were invited to this exhibition. The title refers to the freedom of choice to present students' achievements most fully and widely.
Photography as art domain has been taught in Poznan with various intervals since 1919, when in the Decorative School the Faculty of Artistic Photography was founded for the first time. Current teaching program can be mainly credited to Professor Stefan Wojnecki who started working in our university in mid 70`s. Nowadays photography is a major on intramural and extramural studies. Several hundred of photography graduates have left our university in the last twenty years.
In the course of studies students take part in classes in seven various studios. 781 km exhibition presents works from all studios. Due to individual teaching program in each studio students have to master a wide spectrum of issues. However there are no strict program boundaries between works created under different professors` guidance which is the sign of significant creative freednom in the Department of Photography and Extramural Study of Photography. Even though works presented in the exhibition are mainly classical photography forms, as means of artistic expression students use also video, installations or perfomances based on photography.
As a curator I`ll omit specific information regarding studios in which particular works were created since each student`s work comprises of knowledge and experience gained during encounters with all professor during all classes and lectures. I`ll only list all pedagogues teaching in Department of Photography. The senior and founder of our department is Professor Stefan Wojnecki. Thanks to him all other pedagogues got their degrees and teach now: Associate Professor Krzysztof J. Baranowski, Associate Professor Andrzej P. Florkowski (Dean of Faculty of Multimedia Communication), Professor Witold Przymuszała, Professor Piotr Wołyński (Head of Department of Photography), PhD Sławomir Decyk and assistants: Anna Kędziora, Tomasz Gałecki, Marcin Sztukiewicz and Kamil Wnuk.
I hope that the currention will enable further cooperation of bith schools and creation of new joint artistic projects of both students and pedagogues presented in Lithuania and Poland.
