Landscapes of Reversed Time: Lithuania Minor and Ukraine

The phrase "bombed back to the Stone Age" is said to have originated during the Vietnam War. It expresses the idea that by destroying infrastructure and buildings, a place can be ripped out of the present and "transported" back in time as if by a time machine (Cullather, 2006). This creates landscapes of reversed time. They are now being "drawn" by the photographs of Ukrainian cities destroyed by the Russian Federation. Blackened buildings, cavernous holes where the inside of a house should be, enormous pits where buildings stood, piles of iron blocking the streets, aerial views of fraternal graves, and bodies in the streets captured by satellite fuel the apocalyptic imagination.

As if found in the future, these landscapes of a collapsed civilisation are also photographed by Aleksandras Gliadelovas, who was recently presented at the National Gallery of Art in Lithuania (curated by Gintaras Česonis). His photographs are now an opportunity to compare them with Raimundas Urbonas’ forgotten series "Eastern Prussia" (1988-1997), which was meant to become a book titled "Lost World". This is the same "russkiy mir", thrusting the seized territories into the past.

Illustration: Aleksandr Gliadelov, “Retroville shopping and entertainment centre after shelling. Kyiv”. 2022

Agnė Narušytė (b. 1970) is an art historian, a photography and art critic, and a curator. She graduated from Newcastle University in 1996 where she was studying cinema theory. In 2005, she obtained a PhD from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with The Aesthetics of Boredom: Lithuanian Photography 1980-1990.