Akvilė Anglickaitė (born 1982) lives and creates in Vilnius. She has studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, faculty of photography and media arts, also at the University of Plymouth in England. A. Anglickaitė got her art doctorate degree in 2017; her pieces were presented at the X Baltic Triennial, DeAppel centre in Amsterdam, also contemporary music festivals. Her feature length documentary was shown in over ten cinema festivals. The author collaborates with artists from other fields very often. In her work, A. Anglickaitė employs the mediums of photography, cinematography and sound art, experimenting with the documentary image, investigating the limits of narrative storytelling.

I could describe my artistic practices as research on the anatomy of falseness, where the photographic image is being used as a tool to explore. Every artwork has falseness coming up in different forms, therefore I’ll discuss two of my last works – “Vandenynas” [“Ocean”] and “Kai jis palietė samanas, jo galia perėjo į mišką ir medžių šaknys virto upėmis” [“As soon as he touched the moss, power passed through into the forest, and the roots of trees turned into rivers”], also touching on the wider cultural and social context that inspired them.

In both pieces, the main aesthetic axis is the photographic image, its contradictions and paradoxes. The installation “Vandenynas” is dominated by an algorithmic principle of producing reality – it’s used to erase any borders between reality and falseness. Meanwhile, the second artwork has a coincidence (that became evident in the photographic image) becoming the central idea of the project, and leading the spectator further through the mazes of uncertain states and unnamed principles.

This discussion will continue the venturesome, long-running search for an answer to the question “what is real, anyway?”