Marius Abramavičius
A Multilayered World

On October 7 (Wednesday) at 5.30 pm, a solo exhibition by Marius Abramavičius, ‘A Multilayered World’, opens at the Vilnius Photography Gallery (Stiklių St. 4, entrance from Didžioji St.).

These are like images flowing from the subconscious. Spaces in which memories, sensations, smells and sounds emerge. It seems that with your fingertips you can almost touch the transience and charm of a moment. All of this has long since disappeared, and all of it is still here. Doors, windows and gates remain open, and you can enter through them. You simply do not know what you will see when you turn behind a tree, wade into dark water or raise your head.

I have been photographing the ‘A Multilayered World’ series for eighteen years. During that time, the images accumulated, travelled with me and gradually came together as an exhibition and a photography album of the same title. Each photograph contains more than a single moment. A human portrait meets a landscape, a Vilnius street opens onto the spaces of Nida, and the forests of Lithuania and the Dutchman’s Cap cliff merge with images from India, Iran, Nepal, Bali, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Norway and other countries. Sometimes these images are separated not only by thousands of kilometres, but also by several years.

They meet on the analogue film itself. I photograph the same frame two, three, sometimes four times, in different places and at different times. Sometimes five years pass between the first and last contact with the film. I cannot know in advance exactly what will emerge. One place begins to shine through another, one person finds themselves in another space, and time loses its usual order.

Thus, different cultures and a shared human experience meet within a single photograph. The images overlap much as they do in memory: what we see now simultaneously reminds us of what we once experienced. The eye can wander through the photograph, discovering a new path within it each time, and at the same time let in a vast world concentrated within a single frame.

Sometimes an image reaches us before we find the words for it. In a second, we sense a connection between places and moments that we could talk about for hours. For me, ‘A Multilayered World’ is a space for seeing in this way: what has been does not disappear. Everything is connected to everything else. All of it remains within us and sometimes reappears in the light.

Marius

The exhibition runs until November 7.

Opening hours of the Vilnius Photography Gallery: Tuesday–Friday 12:00–18:00, Saturday 12:00–16:00.

The activities of the Lithuanian Photographers Association are funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.