On 4 November at 6:30 PM, the photography exhibition “The Other Shore”, presenting works by recipients of the Neringa Mayor’s Award, will open at Vilnius Town Hall.
In November, Neringa celebrates its birthday, marking the 589th anniversary of its origins, and this year the programme of festive events also reaches Vilnius. The exhibition presented in the capital invites visitors to discover Neringa through the work of photographers who have explored the region at different times and in different ways.
The exhibition features works by Vitalijus Butyrinas, Alvydas Lukys, Aleksandras Ostašenkovas, Kazimieras Mizgiris, Vaclovas Straukas, Vytautas Daraškevičius, Gintautas Trimakas, Tadas Kazakevičius, Andrius Repšys and Marija Šileikaitė-Čičirkienė.
The Curonian Spit has long held an important place in Lithuanian photography. Its landscape — the lagoon and the sea, sand dunes, forests and settlements — provides photographers with a starting point for reflecting on place and people, observing changes in the environment and exploring the possibilities of the photographic image. In photography, Neringa emerges not only as a recognisable landscape, but also as a place that is lived in, experienced and interpreted differently by each photographer.
In 2017, to mark the 40th edition of the photographers’ symposium “NIDA. Meeting Photography”, Neringa Municipality and the Lithuanian Photographers Association established the Mayor’s Award for photographers. The award recognises artists whose work engages with the nature, architecture and cultural heritage of the Curonian Spit, as well as the people who live or have created there, while also fostering Nida’s photographic tradition.
The exhibition brings together photographers of different generations and diverse creative approaches. Vitalijus Butyrinas’s work reveals a poetic imagination and the possibilities of photomontage; in Alvydas Lukys’s practice, photography becomes an object of conceptual inquiry, while Gintautas Trimakas focuses on experimentation and the very process through which an image is formed. Tadas Kazakevičius turns his attention to people and their lives on the Curonian Spit, while Andrius Repšys explores the relationship between people and their environment. In the works of the other participating artists, Neringa emerges through observations of the landscape, the history of the place and individual photographic experiences.
“The Other Shore” encompasses photographs created in different periods and using a variety of techniques. Together, they reveal how photographers’ relationship with Neringa has changed over time and how the same place can emerge through very different images. Some works focus on the landscape, others on the human presence within it, the traces and signs of place, or the expressive possibilities of photography itself.
Presented at Vilnius Town Hall, the exhibition continues the story of Neringa’s photographic tradition and offers an opportunity to discover it beyond the Curonian Spit. The title “The Other Shore” refers not only to geographical distance, but also to the different perspectives from which photographers explore the same place.
