What's important and what's not in searching new exhibition

  • 2004-01-29
  • By Jayde Will
Vilnius - Art has to ceaselessly reinvent itself. So it is, from time to time, that artists feel the need to get back to the basics of their medium, and find out what makes it the art form that it is and to what end we use it.

That is what the new exhibit at the Contemporary Art Center tries to find out in the third triennial photography exhibition, simply entitled "What is Important?"
The exhibit explores the work of 21 artists from the 10 countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, bringing together a fascinating collection of work, which Dorothee Bienert, one of the show's three curators, describes as a search for identity in the region.
Bienert explains that one of the goals of the exhibit is to get the viewers to discover for themselves what is important, by exploring what is a poetically realized chronicle of everyday life.
Each photograph on display is a very personal testament to photography's unique ability to transmogrify the banal into something more. The pictures range in subject from love found and lost, to portraits documenting the inhabitants of an entire Estonian coastal village, to the arrangement of a library, broken down shelf by shelf and book by book.
During a presentation of their work, several artists gave their explanations of the importance of photography and what the possibilities for the medium were.
In photographing her native Berlin, photographer Wiebke Loeper said that the rapid changes in the city and what she captured on film made her think of the origins of things, and how memory contrasts with actual experience. Her work, she said, showed the exhausted face of the city, but also her personal relations with people, in the form of portraits that outline the character of each subject.
Throughout the gallery, there's an opportunity to see photos alongside video installations, one of which features Knut Asdam's depiction of two women filmed in parallel during a normal day while shopping, walking and generally going about their daily lives. It's described as a picture of the "complex of desires for friendship, intimacy, and meaning through language."
The exhibition has its beginnings as an initiative by a German politician in the early 90s to foster closer relations in northern Europe, which has gradually expanded and grown to include a cultural program that spurs on further joint projects in this area.
"What is Important?" is especially interesting because of its scope of perspectives. Do Germans and Finns, for example, see the question in the same way as Lithuanians or Estonians? Well, there's only one way to find out.
The exhibit, which opened on Jan. 23 at the Contemporary Art Center, runs until Feb. 29.

Contemporary Art Center
2 Vokieciu Street, Vilnius
For more information visit
www.cac.lt