A characteristic feature of Garbštienė‘s creative practice is turning herself into the object of her own works: by immersing herself in various situations, she becomes an integral part of them and provokes the viewer with her performances. Another important aspect of her workstyle is experimentation with language, chance, provocative naiveté, subjective emotional experiences and multicultural contexts. In the series What Should I Do so That the Unicorn Would Come and Lay Its Head on My Lap? (2006) Garbštienė, as a textile artist, was inspired by the tapestry series The Lady and the Unicorn which she saw at a museum in Paris. It is a truly magical story: after fulfilling certain conditions, the heroine meets a mythical creature, which could never be caught. Since only a woman can perform this ritual, the artist tried to depict that one woman, who has the power to see the creature.
Courtesy of the artist
Plant Memory. Wooden Synagogues (2019–ongoing) is a continuing research into rare architectural monuments and the remnants of cultural memory that surround them in order to reconstruct the broken and tragic story of Lithuanian Jews, to restore their lost narrative. Plants from historic Jewish settlements, the ones found growing on endangered wooden monuments, have become monuments themselves. The language of symbol and metaphor is translated into the medium of photography, showing not only the extent of the tragedy, but also, by extending the capabilities of documentary storytelling, reconstructing testimonies of lost times and places.
Collection of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art
Kinčinaitytė is an artist and researcher, who calls herself an alien anthropologist. Her image-making practice is defined by encounters with the eerie, understood as both the cessation of the comfort zone – whether self, human, habit, habitat, milieu — and an alertness to a yet-to-be-identified presence. You Belong to Me focuses on how the visual data accumulated during interplanetary exploration missions forms an anthropocentric reality of Mars. NASA research projects, which grant free access to photographs of the surface of Mars taken by the camera-equipped rovers, provide a unique opportunity to question the digital images produced on a distant planet which has not yet been directly experienced by humankind.
Courtesy of the artist
Soon to Be Gone (2014–ongoing) reflects the restoration of “lost” and tries to catch glimpses of a shifting society. Just within the last few decades, continuous migration has caused the population of Lithuania to shrink by almost one sixth. Towns have monopolised the whole economy and are sucking out young people into the cities, and as free migration to the other EU countries draws them even further away, all this is inexorably changing our countryside. Just one question inevitably arises: for how long will our forests and valleys be adorned by views of homesteads and villages – places where a totally different understanding of time and closeness still exists? For how long will there still be places where an unexpected visitor is met like a close relative and every passer-by is greeted with a heartfelt ‘hello’?
Courtesy of the artist
She or Is (2010) focuses on fragments of her life, those that never occurred, that existed, that continue; experiences which she has had or never will have. The series explores a woman’s existence before she gives birth (or not) and unlinks the concept of motherhood from its usual associations. It is about discontinuous narratives that merge into the light of longing, yearning, loss or reconciliation.
Courtesy of the artist
BackIDENTITY AS A CONCEPT
The turn of the century marked new changes in Lithuanian photography. The development of technology and the emergence of digital photography have transformed it into a major part of contemporary art. As the global art field opened up and the local art scene greedily absorbed different contexts, photography became very diverse.
In their works, artists analyse various contemporary processes and their relationship to the past in different forms. They develop the idea of identity as an unstable, changing social entity. By applying research strategies, artists do not seem to seek objective documentation and no longer claim to reveal the “truth”, but rather aim to destabilise and deconstruct what has seemed self-evident and unchanging.
In the context of global cultural visualisation, namely the excess of images and their constant proliferation, artists highlight the problematic relationship between photography (more broadly, image) and identity.
