FAMM.MA.2023: Hills and Ravines
2023 MA degree show of the Photography, Animation and Media Art department of Vilnius Academy of Arts
The opening will be held on 31 May at 5 pm at the Prospekto Gallery and at 6.30 pm at the Vilnius Photography Gallery. The part of the exhibition at the Prospekto Gallery will run until 17 June and the one at the Vilnius Photography Gallery will be on display until 24 June.
Invisible forces beyond our grasp and imagination shape the terrain of the earth, the most iconic features of which are the hill and the ravine. They are antipodes and yet can hardly exist without each other. However, the hill and the ravine can be perceived not just as landscape forms, but also as archetypes of human experience, knowledge, and its reappraisal. If we picture the hill as a metaphor for solid knowledge, conviction, ir even dogm, the ravine is where we find ourselves when we have lost that knowledge and belief, when the hill of internalised truths has slipped from under our feet and we have slid down its slope into the abyss of doubt, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Yet it is from there that we can see the slope of another hill to climb or even run up.
The 2023 MA degree show of the Photography, Animation and Media Art (FAMM) department of Vilnius Academy of Arts may look like an illustration of the universal laws governing this dynamic of knowledge and its crisis. Still, it is also a cross-section of the puzzling terrain probed by a specific group of people, which is unique and particular to the here and now. The issues they address are inevitably informed by the major forces shaping the present, including the anthropocene, evolution of technology, decolonisation of knowledge, and reconciliation with nature, but this exhibition is not about trends. Every question here originates in sincere personal doubt or intuition, which disturbs the former confidence and reveals new knowledgescapes.
What should you hold on to when you realize that for most of your life you have believed in the originals of works of art you have never seen firsthand? How is it possible to immerse the viewer in an experience of art without resorting to the most convenient tools that dictate their own rules? What unremembered and ungraspable forces have been shaping us and our environment since the times when we did not exist? What future memory do our actions shape in this very moment? Why do we become emotionally attached to toxic landscapes that pose a threat to the environment? Perhaps because we can learn to see their peculiar beauty if we manage to dissociate it from the conventional notion of aesthetics and realize that artistic education and status are not necessary for that? At the same time we may come to see that even the absent, imaginary, vaguely sensed body of our own can say more than its familiar physical existence, even when it turns into an abstract, impalpable, ghostly ornament. Finally, it may turn out that it makes more sense to leave the hill of rational knowledge and reasoning itself for the ravine of ritual bodily experience, intuitive cognition, alternative belief systems, and altered states of consciousness – if only to climb up another hilltop with a broader view, ephemeral as it may be. Even if we have to run up that hill with no time to reflect on everything calmly.
Jurij Dobriakov
Artists:
Prospekto Gallery, Gedimino Ave 43:
Linas Kristupas Gabrielaitis
Skaistė Jauraitė
Tamara Pathak
Austėja Riškutė
Ugnė Šiaučiūnaitė
Vilnius Photography Gallery, Stiklių St 4:
Gabija Vėja Bagdonaitė
Marius Kavaliauskas
Vytautas Kuklys
Kotryna Kvedarytė
Kotryna Sajevičiūtė
Gabrielė Monginaitė
Saulė Norkutė
Vladislav Novicki
Opening hours of the galleries:
Tue–Fri 12–6 pm, Sat 12–4 pm
The public defence of the MA degree projects will take place on 7–8 June.
The exhibition is organised by the VAA FAMM Department in collaboration with the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association.
The Lithuanian Photographers Association is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
