Photo exhibition „Familiar-Unfamiliar“
Project from the cycle „4 x 4“
Curator: Eglė Deltuvaitė
16 04 2008 – 30 04 2008
Pavlo Gudimov Art Centre “JA”, Kiev, Ukraine
When, where and why do you feel familiar or unfamiliar? Who, what space, people, things are and become yours and when they are alien for you? How do you look at familiar and unfamiliar space, people and things? When your environment becomes yours?
The main focus of this exhibition is a private space of a man, things belonging to it, identity of a person, signs of everyday life, being, thinking, rethinking and junction of the stereotypes.
In the series “Traces” (implemented from 1999) Gytis Skudžinskas records living territories, unrepresentative places of the city united by the author’s personal experience and its margins. Images which merge in double exposition, conscious choice of the photographer and different angles of watching make it difficult to recognise the space. It is personal experience of place from Naujoji Akmenė till Paris. Ramunė Pigagaitė lets in a little bit closer – to the staircases of the blocks of flats. Women who clean the staircases wear varicoloured housecoats which interflow with emerald green wall. It may seem that this action doesn’t have a lot of in common with aesthetics, but one must recognise that it looks extremely delicate; as if those women have been frozen in the move of unknown dance.
Arturas Valiauga explores the theme of human identity trough the everyday life of Dutch living in Lithuania and Lithuanians living in the Netherlands.
All photographers explore emotions aroused by familiar and unfamiliar spaces in their works.
Things, signs, portraits and reframed images turn to the panorama of man’s or family’s history. It is photographic research about the subjects that you will not find on the front paper of newsletter. It seems that A. Valiauga by his photography points at particular things we don’t notice or maybe we don’t even want to notice in everyday life. And Joana Deltuvaitė leaves a human outside the field of seeing. She is interested in temporal environment that create people living in squatter houses. While observing the fragments of specific environment, position of things we unconsciously create the portrait of inhabitant. Her choice to exhibit the series in a mosaic of a lot of small pictures reflects the wish to show the miscellaneous life of the society of squatters. She specially do not refer to exact place of squatter house (so we do not understand is it Amsterdam, London or Berlin from the picture) emphasizing that the culture of squatters is the common and the same everywhere. This project forces us to discuss about the tolerance and understanding of each other.
All photographers explore emotions aroused by familiar and unfamiliar spaces in their works. These questions are researched in different ways, but the strategies joining in particular points only strengthen the possibility to understand what is familiar for somebody and what is not.
Joana Deltuvaitė. From the series Squatter Houses, International project „European Reflections“, 2006
Ramunė Pigagaitė. From the series Cleaning Woman, 2004
Gytis Skudžinskas. From the series „Traces“, 1999 – 2006
Arturas Valiauga. From the series Still Identity. International Photography and Research Network; Project Work. Changing Faces. 2005.
Curator: Eglė Deltuvaitė
Organisers: Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Ukraine, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania, Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers
Partners: Art Centre „JA“
Sponsors: LR Culture Support Foundation, Vilnius City Municipality
