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23/5/2007

There once was...

Giedre Bartelt Galerie, Berlin

Ramune Pigagaite and Arturas Valiauga

Ramune Pigagaite and Arturas Valiauga are two of the most remarkable Lithuanian photographers, they influence new developments in photography and are inspiration to the next generation of more younger photographers.

Ramune Pigagaite has been living in Germany since 1992 where she studied Photography. She concentrates on character portraits via her own personal identity. Artist returns to Varena, her native town in the south of Lithuania, to carry out her projects. Since 2000 Pigagaite has been working on a cycle People of my town. She takes photos of various people in the open air before the same white wall of the local food market. Their professions seem strange, antiquated and curios: poet, beekeeper, rat-catcher etc. In Pigagaite`s comparatively small-sized color photographs (a mere 35 by 23 centimeters in size) professional attributes are like theatrical costumes that put a man into a certain fixed role. The characters look funny because their `untouched` faces have nothing in common with the roles their attributes so vividly declare. This is an ethnographic glimpse that collects features characteristic to a certain region. People that stand before her camera are mere`representatives`(of profession, region); they do not have their history that would enable us to imagine them as real persons.

In the middle of the 1990s Arturas Valiauga got famous for his fantastic fashion photographs. Maybe this estrangement from reality that is so characteristic to advertising rekindled his interest in photography with a sharp odor of reality. `The Talks with Stepas` unfold as one looks at the walls of an old country house papered with magazine and newspaper clippings. Here one can find `the entire life`: from a hen (of course, the image of it), and Lithuanian "Peasants Newspaper" to a well-known professor of history philosophizing on a TV screen. A few`real`things and people merge into this medley and turn into images.

The space in the photos of his cycle is radically flat - the surface of walls papered with various clippings goes almost even with the surface of a photo, and spaces that open up in the doors are nothing more than another framed image. The space plane is disturbed only by a random shadow, which is surreally discrepant and opens strange voids. Time composed of read or leafed through magazines stands frozen in fragments of past. Therefore in Valiauga`s cycle the photographic narrative (shadows, light, expressions, moment) about a man is replaced by a narrative of found images, only the assemblage is also found, not made by author.

Opening on Thursday, May 24th

Giedre Bartelt Gallery
Linienstrasse 161- Berlin
Free admission

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