An exhibition “Image Zone” of Arturas Valiauga will be opened at Klaipėda Photography Gallery at the KCCC Exhibition Hall on the 23rd of June (Friday) at 6 PM. The residents and guests of the port city will have an opportunity to see the retrospective, spanning more than twenty years, of the works of the famous photographer of a middle generation.
The series presented in the exhibition are united by the idea of the image mode as an identification of a certain territory. The author inevitably advances some images at the expense of the others; by collecting photographs he creates safe opportunities for experiencing various zones and at the same time he passes his own personal experience. Defined territories – zones – are the bodies of prisoners, marked by tattoos (“Jesus, Mary, Mama and Everything Else”, 1996), a private area which became a reflection of the world (“I Was at Stepas, We Talked About Life”, 2002), the space of frozen time (“A Week Has Eight Days”, 1999) or the limits drawn by nature or policy (“Between the Shores”, 2008, “The Land of Longing”, 2013). According to Eglė Deltuvaitė, the creative producer of A. Valiauga, this exhibition is interesting not only for its structure, which is going to be unexpected even for the audience which is already familiar with the works of the artist, but also for its display solution. One of the gallery areas will reflect on the private residential zone, which allows visualising the life of the artworks in the home environment. Furniture and interior details will come from the collection of an antiquary collector and poet, Edmundas Kelmickas.
Since the year of 1999 A. Valiauga consistently analyses the theme of social and national identity in his photography projects, he records the processes and results of the alteration of this identity and through images analyses the concept and its manifestations of homes in a broader sense. The author observes a man and his living surroundings, identifies the identification marks with a camera and typologises it in its intermediate states. Altering social-cultural situation and the existence of the characters in it is the common denominator of visual studies of A. Valiauga.
Another benchmark of A. Valiauga is the history of Lithuania, the experience of the Soviet era; however, his attitude towards our surroundings is not nostalgic, he does not look for signs of the past in contemporary everyday life. On the contrary, A. Valiauga analyses the things which are not here anymore, which have changed and why. The author does not try to eliminate the sings of the present from the photographs or disguise unromantic, not sublime, domestic and awkward fragments of reality. Lithuanian identity is important to him in the context of the modern world of the 21st centuryEurope. It can be suggested that A. Valiauga is characterized by a conscious, open and critical attitude towards the contemporary, the management of colour and the sense of time, the alteration of form and expression of the photography according to a target set for a specific theme.
According to Darius Vaičekauskas, the president of Klaipėda Department of the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers, “This exhibition is a wonderful opportunity for the residents of the port city as well as the city guests to get a closer look at the photography of Arturas Valiauga. We will also present a collection of postcards of the author’s photographs published especially for this exhibition and they will be available for purchase at the exhibition. Furthermore, we are going to invite you to the creative workshop with A. Valiauga in the near future. However, first of all – we invite you to the opening of the exhibition!”.
The project is partially financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Klaipėda City Municipality. The project is organised by Klaipėda Department of the Union of Lithuanian Art Photographers. The curators of the exhibition are Eglė Deltuvaitė and Darius Vaičekauskas.
