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Generation of the Place: Image, Memory and Fiction in the Baltics - a group Baltic artists exhibition

From 2nd till 23rd of March 2012 the exhibition curated by Vytautas Michelkevičius (LT) is on show in Kaunas photography gallery which is the leading gallery working with photography in Lithuania.
The exhibition is a part of the project Re:Searching the Baltics, aimed at reviewing photography used by Baltic artists born in the 1970–80s. Grown up in the shift of two eras, this generation still has vivid memories from the early Soviet childhood, mixed with the experience from the teen years in rapidly changing Post-Soviet environment. The experience of this local fin de siècle gave the generation a specific commonness, clearly separating them from earlier and later, entirely Post-Soviet, generations.
The late 1980s was also the time when Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania stronger identified themselves as the Baltics. The three countries that had no common history neither identity before the beginning of the 20th Century engaged into common political movements. The Baltics had to generate their identity as a place, since before they were mere a part of the Soviet Union for the rest of the world.
The project aims at asking what it means to be a generation related by the particular place. Does the place generate us, or do we generate our place? Does the geopolitical unity of the region implicate commonalities in the art as well? What is the common memory of generation and how does it show in its imagery? What kind of common experiences, real or fictive, could we trace in works of one artists’ generation?
The exhibition has several interconnected thematic layers: the status of documentary as a genre, photographic thinking about time and place, looking for specific qualities of the local, common features of the generation and its’ specific way of using still and moving photography in contemporary art.
At the same time there is a need for contextualization of different photographic practices in the Baltics. All the participating artists have shown their works in the West but never came together at exhibition to tell a sited narrative. Images at the exhibition let one experience the local fiction stories as well as the imprints of the memory.
In the end of 2011, the project was summed up with the book which represented more extensive research including texts and more artists‘ images.
The exhibition was produced together with Estonian Union of Photography Artists and for the first time shown in Tallinn Art Hall in the framework of Tallinn Month of Photography. More about the programme http://www.fotokuu.ee/
Artists in the book and the exhibition: Arnis Balčus (LV), Ugnius Gelguda (LT), Marge Monko (EE), Akvilė Anglickaitė (LT), Ieva Epnere (LV), Krista Mölder (EE), Robertas Narkus & Milda Zabarauskaitė (LT), Kaspars Podnieks (LV), Elina Ruka (LV), Rimas Sakalauskas (LT), Tadas Šarūnas (LT), Sigrid Viir (EE), Ivars Gravlejs (LV).
Texts in the book by Harry Weeks (UK), Jurij Dobriakov (LT), Vytautas Michelkevičius (LT), Sergei Kruk (LV), Lina Michelkevičė (LT).