Mobilities in and Beyond the Frame

On 3 December (Wednesday) at 5.30 p.m., the Prospektas Gallery (Gedimino Ave. 43, Vilnius) will open the group exhibition Mobilities in and Beyond the Frame. During the opening, the Lithuanian Photographers Association will also present the 2025 yearbook Lithuanian Photography. For this publication, the editor Agnė Gintalaitė has selected 302 works by 32 artists. The volume also includes texts by Lina Michelkevičė, Dovilė Jakniūnaitė and Agnė Gintalaitė. The exhibition features only a small selection of works included in this publication.

The exhibition Mobilities in and Beyond the Frame at Prospektas Gallery introduces the publication of the same title, which contains no hierarchical sequencing or canon, no beginners’ section, no division into good or bad photography, art or non-art. Instead, the works function as interconnected knots of meanings and ideas, inviting us to contemplate Lithuanian photography as a mobile, unfinished network in which history, geography and technology shift together with our movements, pauses and our capacity to look critically at the world.

Juozas Kazlauskas, in his photographs, presents movement as an existential necessity for experiencing and understanding the borderlines of human existence. He moves not only geographically but also politically, from the Arctic to the January 1991 Events in Vilnius. He moves poetically as well. It is precisely this poetic motion in the photograph Dreams of My Childhood (1985) that prompted its choice as a departure point for the exhibition and publication. This playful, little-known image, which does not fit the canon, opens up what always interested the photographer – movement, travel, risky adventure, crossing the usual limits of human capability. One can only suspect that the making of this image also involved technological experimentation. Through an aeroplane window, we see clouds and a man flying, like Peter Pan or Superman.

I find historical, political and poetic layers of mobility not only in Kazlauskas’s work but also in that of Romualdas Augūnas. The images from Augūnas’s Pamir expedition reveal topography as a field where colonial and anti-colonial movements intertwine, with Lithuanian mountain names becoming a quiet form of resistance inscribed onto the maps of the empire.

Rūta Spelskytė’s photography traces magnetite trajectories and investigates non-rational modes of orientation, in which travel understood as investigation generates sensory rather than narrative knowledge. Other artists expand the notion of mobility by moving away from travel – but only in the literal sense. In Alis Balbierius’s bird’s-eye views, gravel roads transform slow-movement infrastructures into delicate, living lines inscribed into the landscape as traces of co-creation between humans and the natural world, rather than a struggle against nature. Gytis Skudžinskas’s Waiting Zones, with their conceptual and poetic typological gaze, rhyme the spaces of airports where the promise of mobility dissolves into a slow melting of time and place becomes a depersonalised no man’s land. Rėda Brandišauskienė’s White Darkness highlights tensions in social and political mobility regimes through a cityscape intervention that critically exposes neoliberal real-estate urbanism growing at the expense of UNESCO-protected heritage. The Sienos Grupė’s (the Border Group) forest documents reveal how policies restricting movement wound human bodies, with swamps and thickets becoming weapons of the border. Visvaldas Morkevičius’s Kostya reflects on the forced mobility caused by war and uses the latest technologies to reconstruct not only the appearance of home but also its feeling. These works make clear that (im)mobility is never neutral – it can signify both coercion and privilege.

At times, one wishes to step away from war, untruth, pain and evil – if only briefly. To the Moon and back. Technological and cosmic mobility unfolds in Artūras Medvedevas’s astrophotography, where the human gaze, mediated by technology, becomes a cyborg gaze and perceives deep time caught in the haze. In Dominyka Kaselytė’s micro-story, photography moves not only from moment to moment but also through emotions, creating an affective, intersubjective space that refuses to let us forget, however ordinary, domestic or seemingly insignificant it may be. This is how city legends come into being. Vėjas Šimbelis (Das Vegas), in Step by Step, not only returns the study of human movement to a visual narrative but also exposes the system of representation as unable to fully grasp the experience of mobility. The artist uses technology to generate knowledge about movement from a post-positivist epistemological perspective: contrary to the classical studies of Marey or Muybridge, he does not submit to the regime of rationality but opens up to disturbances, surprise and polysemy.

Agnė Gintalaitė

Exhibition participants: Romualdas Kęstutis Augūnas, Alis Balbierius, Rėda Brandišauskienė, Dominyka Kaselytė, Juozas Kazlauskas, Artūras Medvedevas, Visvaldas Morkevičius, Sienos Grupė, Gytis Skudžinskas, Rūta Spelskytė, Das Vegas.

Exhibition curator and publication editor: Agnė Gintalaitė.

The exhibition is open until 17 January.

The activities of the Lithuanian Photographers Association are funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and supported by the Media Support Fund.

Prospektas Gallery opening hours:
Tue–Fri 12:00–18:00; Sat 12:00–16:00

Illustrations:
Juozas Kazlauskas
Visvaldas Morkevičius
Das Vegas
Alis Balbierius