Photo reportage from the exhibition 'HURRICANE THERESA' by SetP Stanikas at Prospekto Photography Gallery

December 20, 2016
Author Echo Gone Wrong

img_3426-1024x672The exhibition opening by SetP Stanikas HURRICANE THERESA opened on 1st of December at the Prospekto Photography Gallery (Gedimino ave. 43, Vilnius). Exhibitions on view till December 31.
It is convenient to talk about SetP Stanikas “photography”, to squeeze the works of these artists to a “narrow” professional manufactory, since after establishing the “limits” it is easier to discern the elements which paradoxalize, problematize the concept of photography. It is convenient also because, in Stanikas works, photography as a mean, as a performative media, is an important, if not the most important thread linking the different stages of their creative biography. In general, Stanikas are to be considered among those artists who dismantled, reconstructed, and basically transformed the stereotypes of photography.
“Soapbox” metaphysics. SetP Stanikas were, within the context of Lithuanian contemporary art, one of the first ones to profanise the concept of “high art photography”, when they began to use the so-called “soapbox” – “point and shoot” – camera as a mechanism that simply captures the reality. The soapbox can also be understood metaphorically, as a strategy for seeing and constructing the view. In the first half of the 90s, Stanikas, as some other contemporary artists, transformed the photographic language and reformed it with the kind of formal and notional content that was previously considered to be foreign to real art (and the real art photography).
Hurricane Theresa. Speaking of the formal and conceptual background of this particular project, which Paulius and Svajonė Stanikas present in a photography gallery, it is possible to say that the artists remain loyal to stylistics of the amateur inscenization and staging, presented in the “high style” within the context of peculiar symbolism. The photography, on the one hand, appeals to a variety of installation-domestic situations that both come up in the field of vision and remain behind the scenes. At the same time, printed to be the size of promotional stands, it deliberately drifts towards a poster and press photography, because the artificiality of these photographic images is not disguised – the fact that they are processed digitally and that is sometimes even emphasized, highlighted. At the same time, the photographic images are associated with moving video images.
On the conceptual level, Stanikas, as always, manipulate certain socio-political and socio-cultural contents, recognizable from the mass media and hinting to cotemporary realities. Sometimes, on the verbographic level, there are allusions to Arabic or Hebrew characters, but only to the extent of an unconscious semi-abstract association. The distinctive, promotional or Hollywood-like symbolism is also distinctive to Stanikas – black vs. white, war vs. peace, life vs. death, history vs. fate.
For the content of this photographic installation, Stanikas, once again, use a real person – Theresa May (the artists often use famous women and their biographical stories as a starting point for their installations), as a reference to the story of Brexit, as well as symbolic of war. Here again, the narrative content is comparable to promotional, “lifestyle” magazine and broadcast aesthetics, and well as pointedly banal context is covered up by using an almost classic aesthetic tradition and the fundamental questions of life and death.

SetP Stanikas (Svajonė and Paulius Stanikas) are artists, whose creative path is continuing for a third decade. Artist were participating in many prestigious exhibitions and projects, among which are Venice Biennale (represented Lithuania in 50th edition of the Biennale), Liverpool, Moscow and Beijing Biennales, Pompidou Center, Gallery VU in Paris, “White Box” in New York, Other Gallery in Shanghai etc. After successful show at the Venice Bienale Stanikas artistic duo were invited to teach at the Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains.

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Photography: Vilma Samulionytė