A duo exhibition “Depths, Cuts and Grains” by artists Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė and Louise Oates was opened Tuesday, 13th March, at “Prospekto galerija” (Prospekto Photography Gallery, Gedimino ave. 43, Vilnius). During the opening, both artists and the exhibition text author Lisa Stein will be present to guide you through the exhibition and have a discussion about it.
Artists Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė and Louise Oates encourage to question the ambiguity of the photographic image and the act of looking itself, which here is considered as a constant movement between distance and proximity, existence and non-existence of the image. The exhibition consisting of objects, photographs and video reflects this ambiguity through the authors’ approach towards the image creation while appropriating the scientific strategies of observation and research. It materializes in the dialogues between the images from Mexican jungle, depths of the Chilean mines and surfaces of the planet Mars and Iceland.
Lisa Stein in her text, which is also a part of the exhibition, says that “to acknowledge the material reality of a photograph is to recognize that “the materiality of information technology starts from the soil and the underground”, and that photography is entangled with the “material histories of labor and the planet”. It is to reconsider the processes and exploitation associated with the extraction of material resources, and the role of photography in observing, claiming and occupying a territory or distant planet. While its resources may not be tangible, the practice of photography itself can be understood as a form of mining. What we must ask ourselves is what exactly we are trying to extract, by what means, and to what end? Only a photograph that is freed from its traditional role as a realist mode or representation, that does not allow us to simply look through it, can interrogate its own surface, be a critical index of itself. Only a photograph that obscures and defamiliarizes vision can become about the act of looking, and confront us with our own physicality. Faced with the unintelligible, the illegible, we are forced to reflect upon ourselves; how we see, and think about the world, not through the photograph but with it.”
Both artists are participants of various national and international art projects, authors of personal exhibitions, and winners of different grants. This is the first exhibition together, where they communicate the issues they care about through the photographic language.
Louise Oates is an artist based in London who graduated from BA Photography at London College of Communication. Oates works across photography and sculpture which deals with notions of human perception, material agency and extractionism. Her work has recently exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Le Bal, Paris and in the Antarctic Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė is a London-based artist who is interested in researching emerging complexities of our corporeal experience in the contemporary landscape of media technologies. She investigates interplays between the body, image and medium through her practice in photography and moving image. Geistė is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London, and holds a BA in Media and Communications (Photography) and an MA in Film and Screen Studies. Recent solo exhibitions include: The eyes are most sensitive to red, Sodų 4, Vilnius; You Belong to Me, Fotogalleriet, Oslo; The European Commission, London; Kaunas Photography Gallery, Kaunas. Group shows include; Body and Darkness, Galerija Vartai, Vilnius; Taken Territories, Inside–Out Art Museum, Beijing; The Body of the Letter, Sodų 4, Vilnius; FreshFaced+WildEyed 2014, The Photographers’ Gallery, London.
Depths, Cuts and Grains
2018 03 13—04 07
Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė, Louise Oates
Prospekto Photography Gallery (Gedimino ave. 43, Vilnius)
Photography: Louise Oates