On Wednesday, 12 June, at 6pm, photographer and poet Alexandra Bondarev’s exhibition Homing Around opens at the Drifts contemporary art gallery, located at T. Vrublevskio Str. 6-2, Vilnius. This is the artist’s first solo show in Lithuania, presenting a series of analogue photographs and poetic texts, as well as a video work. The works on display reflect an authentic gaze into the Human and the concept of homing around as the practice of being with oneself and with the Other.
‘In the last decade, I’ve been on the move a lot, with no fixed physical home. After a longer stay in Georgia, later wandering around Morocco and other places, I started to observe what induces the feeling of home in me, and to look for it more consciously – to home around. I understand ‘home’ in a broader sense – as a space (not necessarily four-walled) where we feel and can be ourselves, through various habits and rituals, and, most importantly, through the presence of other authentic people,’ explains author Alexandra Bondarev, elaborating on the concept of homing around.
The works in this exhibition are thus the result of such practice of homing around. Hung across the gallery like everyday clothes plucked from a backpacker’s rucksack, these photographs focus on the Human – naked, real and therefore homey, paradoxically both uniquely individual, and embodying universal values, timeless truths. There is no distinction between children, the elderly, mountaineers, and street vendors encountered on the road and the closest of friends or family. Blurring the boundary between the global and the local, individual selfhood and belonging to a community no longer negate each other but function as two sides of the same one-way ticket. This ticket, meanwhile, leads Home – to oneself in relation to the Other.
‘Homing around on the road coincided accidentally with an analogue camera appearing on my neck: I began capturing these authentic, homelike moments and people. The act of photography itself, fully inhabiting the life witnessed through the lens as well as writing it down not only with ‘light’ but also with words, became one of the aforementioned home-creating rituals,’ the artist continues.
The images, based on the principles of humanistic anthropology and spontaneous documentary, are accompanied by texts: poetic fragments born out of experiences on the road-home, and stories that contextualise the shots.
Artist meetings with Alexandra Bondarev will be organised during the exhibition. The first tour with the author will take place on 15 June, at 2pm. For information about further meetings, please see Drifts Gallery’s social networks.
Alexandra Bondarev is a young-generation artist working in the fields of analogue photography, documentary video, textual storytelling, and poetry. After living in multiple countries and travelling around different continents for the past decade, she has been spending more time in her native Vilnius since 2023.
Well-known in the Lithuanian art scene as a translator and editor of cultural texts, Alexandra Bondarev has been sharing her personal work more widely since 2022. In 2023, her works were first presented at the Tbilisi gallery Fotografia in a three-photographer show titled Based in Tbilisi; at the contemporary art fair-exhibition Komisas at Tech Zity in Vilnius; and the Vilnius Photography Weekend. In 2022, her poetic work was published in the Sarajevo cultural magazine Punkura and later presented at the Rupert Centre for Art and Education and the MO Museum in Vilnius as part of the interdisciplinary project Love Chrestomathy. Homing Around is the artist’s first solo exhibition.
The exhibition at Drifts Gallery will run until 28 June 2024. The gallery is located in Vilnius, T. Vrublevskio Str. 6-2. Opening hours: Wed–Fri 12–6 pm, Sat 12–4 pm. Admission is free of charge.
The exhibition is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.