We invite you to the opening of Aleksandras Ostašenkovas’ exhibition “The Other Shore” on October 1 at 5:00 PM!
The exhibition will be open until October 31.
THE ARTIST ON THE EXHIBITION
The trembling soul, hiding from everyday life, has changed its thinking and sensory receptors. The analysis of the soul has become the only true meaning of existence, and creativity, as the anthropology of that process, the only true object, worthy of suffering and life itself.
The era lived and experienced, filtered through emotional nature and experience, turns into a human state, a reaction to subjective truths. It is a meditative dialogue about the human being, his uniqueness, and irreplaceability, inhabited in an existential flash. You perceive this gift as an exceptional opportunity—to think, to feel, to mourn, to rejoice in the uniqueness of Life, to observe and marvel at the Mystery, to approach and withdraw from its solution. Only those who listen to and analyze Silence feel and experience the full diversity of life.
“The Other Shore” is a metaphor, a symbol, a layout of life as a phenomenon in time, of human experience, and the soul. It is a state that has grown with you, a certain stage within you and in time, an imprint that you cannot erase. That state is painfully familiar, like spiritual pain intensifying with the arrival of autumn. Life is charming because the soul aches. A sensitive person opens the Door to a kindred soul. After decades of meditation and purposeful wandering through the labyrinths of existence, she chose her portrait as the object of observation and analysis. I am grateful to her for not abandoning me at critical life moments and for allowing me to lift the veil of the Great Mystery through the language of photography. Everything has a beginning and an end. Only the Other Shore, traveling through time, never comes closer. It stretches into infinity, toward Eternity.
I look out the window and see the city. Smoke curls from chimneys, dissolving into the fog. The leafless trees barely sway. Early spring. The horizon line is not visible. Somewhere below, people walk, cars drive. I can’t see them—the window frame blocks the view—I only hear the hum, the voices. And above it all, a gray sky. I will stay here for a little longer…
The Other Shore is the essence of human life, an existential question filled with doubts, conclusions, efforts to grasp the ungraspable, to understand the world and oneself, to name the values of life in the ever-changing experience of the miraculous existential flash granted to us.
Life is given to be lived, to be known as the years pass, and when consciousness approaches the fateful boundary—to be disappointed, realizing that you have understood nothing in life, that, as Isaac Newton said, “I am but a small child playing on the shore of the ocean.” The Other Shore is a metaphor, a summary of our already lived life, it is the content of life between the arising and accumulated experience, between birth and death, constantly discovering new truths and meanings…
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Aleksandras Ostašenkovas (born 1951) lives and creates in Šiauliai. He has held 113 solo exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad, participated in over 170 national and international exhibitions, and has won more than 70 awards. His photographs are held by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the Lithuanian Art Museum, the Lithuanian Theatre, Music and Cinema Museum, the Photography Museum, the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association, the International Federation of Photographic Art in Lausanne (Switzerland), the State Drama Theatre of Šiauliai, and private collectors.
He is a member of the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association, the Lithuanian Journalists’ Union, the International Journalists’ Federation, a photographic artist (AFIAP) with the International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP), and has been awarded the Lithuanian Government Prize for Culture and Art (2013), the Šiauliai City Culture and Art Awards (2004, 2008, 2014), and the Neringa Municipality Mayor’s Award (2019). In 2009, he was honored with the Šiauliai County Governor’s Medal of Honor “For Contributions to Šiauliai County,” and in 2018, for his contributions to Lithuanian culture and art, he was awarded the Ministry of Culture’s Medal of Honor “Carry Your Light and Believe.”
