Scale, media, and materiality in Aistė Kirvelytė’s creative work

Aistė Kirvelytė – an artist, in whose work movement between media, firstly between photographic or cinema/video representation and painting is a fundamental part. This movement is constantly complicated by the change of the scale – a film shot, or its photographic print is fragmented, a repainted newspaper photograph becomes the size of a wall, and their sequence – gigantic pseudo comics. At the same time, the idea of photographic (analogue) and painterly surface is complicated. This presentation focuses attention on the materiality of moving between media, zoom operations in uncharacteristic media, traces of the physical conditions of creation in the works, the interaction of photography and painting.

Natalija Arlauskaitė is a researcher of visuality and cinema and a professor at the Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science. Her main areas of interest are visual and media theory, the historical imagination, Soviet studies, World War II memory, and medical imagery. Her books include A Brief Handbook of Feminist Film Theory (2010), Olymp of Us and Others: Screenings Between Narrative Theory and Cultural Criticism (2014), Fierce Peace: the Photography of Collapsed Regimes in Documentary Cinema (2020, all published by the Vilnius University Press). Together with Lina Kaminskaitė, she co-authored In Focus: Women in Lithuanian Cinema (Lapas, 2021). Together with Miglė Anušauskaitė she co-authored To Look and to be Looked at: comics and terms of feminist film theory (Lapas, 2023)