Photography measures the pulse of Vilnius: glimpses - signs - destructions - reconstructions

This lecture is an essay about Vilnius written with photographs in 16 decades. Since around 1860, photographers have been trying to fit the city into the frame of the camera obscura. But it doesn't fit. And there is nothing left but to restore the width of the romantic gaze by combining the shots into a panorama. But the time in Vilnius doesn't fit either. Ever-changing owners, their own or strangers, leave signs, destroy the previous ones, introduce something, rebuild, update, and the city becomes completely inaccessible to the camera. All that remains is to record your states and moods in a changing environment, where the old self is fighting with the useful but imposed modernization and the invasions of the densifying modern megalopolis. Photographers are now observing the tilted "city differently", whose gutted, daily reassembled identity is disturbing.

Gintaras Zinkevičius. Dislocation. 1992

 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.

Photo by Gintautas Trimakas