Vytautas Balčytis. Photographs
Opening - on the 6 th of September, at 16.00, in Curonian Spit History Museum (Pamario str. 53). From Edmondas Kelmickas (e.k.art gallery) kollection
Vytautas Balčytis is well known middle generation Lithuanian photographer, who started to work in 80’s of last century. Critics of photography would ascribe him to the tendencies of “banal object” or “boredom” in photography. He started to participate in exhibitions with such photographers as Remigijus Pačėsa, Gintautas Trimakas or Alfonsas Budvytis.
Vytautas Balčytis is a quiet, patient observer whose eye picks up all that is insignificant, plain, leftover or forgotten. He tells his stories in whispers, endowing his modest pictures of seemingly random things with existential importance. The titles of his works, which note only places and dates, could be fragments of journal entries. Looking at a Balčytis photograph is like sifting through or awakening the memories of people who lived through the late Soviet era.
Balčytis has been investigating the nightmare of everyday Soviet life since the 1980s. Nothing happens in his photographs. But, although there are neither aggressors nor victims, every building or object becomes a mute hostage. The photographer is especially interested in the most mundane objects – the ones that don’t draw much attention yet shape everyday life all the more. In the memory contained within each photograph, Balčytis archives abandoned factories and construction sites, run-down student residences, dusty windows and telephone booths in some of the poorest Vilnius, Kaunas or rural neighborhoods. The photographer notes every expressive detail. In these bleak settings, propaganda slogans become dangerously familiar, even intimate. The banality of oppression is simply horrifying. (R.Jurėnaitė)
By recording the permanence of things in historical time Balčytis dissolves it with the evidence of the ephemeral nature of present – hardly touching existence with a flash of light. For Agnė Narušytė it seems that two speeds of time clash here: the slowly fading past and quickly disappearing present; the past keeps pushing the present out. It does not linger, but photography needs temporariness guaranteeing an intensive experience. For the author of these images the act of photographing helps to suspend the present.
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Vytautas Balčytis was born 1955 in Vorkuta, Russia. Graduated from Vilnius Civil Engineering Institute, 1979. Member of the Lithuanian Union of Art Photographers, 1982. Works owned by Lithuanian Union of Art Photographers, Vilnius; Lithuanian Art Museum, Vilnius; Lithuanian National Museum, Vilnius; Muzeum Narodowe, Wroclaw, Poland; Museum of Fine Arts, Lodz, Poland; Museum of Fine Arts, Paris, France; Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey, USA; Private collections.
