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On February 1, 2024, at 5.30 p.m., the exhibition ‘Portrait of an Unnamed Time. 1968-2024’ by Aleksandras Ostašenkovas opens at the Photography Museum (Vilniaus St. 140, Šiauliai). The exhibition will run until April 3, 2024.
A. Ostašenkovas’ worldview, the relationship with the human being, values and the authorial style are not subject to changing times, epochs, social orders or fashions. His profound creation, calm and speaking about foundational meanings have been a strong counterweight to the superficiality, materiality and vanity of today’s world for already several decades. It enchains the attention, makes one pause, immerse oneself in a meditative journey into the depths of one’s being, experience the breath of eternity, which is unveiled in the photographs, empathically feel the author’s time, fates and experiences of people who surrounded him.
The exhibition presents the series ‘Portrait of an Unnamed Time. 1968-2024’ created by the author over many decades. Its development was motivated by the need to reflect on the changing time and experience, to collect personally experienced life fragments, to summarize time and one’s being in time. The series generalises the experiences of the author and his contemporaries, talks about the slips of time, personal and social fractures, values, relationships, and temporality. The exhibition is full of pensive existential sensibility, premonitions of temporality and nonexistence, peculiar depth and attention to the environment, the human’s being, feelings, destiny.
The series of photographs ‘Portrait of an Unnamed Time’ arose from the need to reflect on the changing time, experience, to collect personally experienced life fragments, to summarize time and one’s being in time.
The content of the photographs penetrates into the eyes, bodies, fates of people who have changed or are no longer present, observes and analyses the psychology of the subject, the change in the physical body and soul, the revaluation of spiritual values in the context of time, social and political signs, at the turn of epochs. This is a conversation about human values, compromises, about the past, present and future time, about the wish to recreate one’s biography and sometimes, even to opt out of one’s nature. It is the artist’s proposal to the viewer and interlocutor to recognize a different self in the course of time, to perceive the content of the metaphor, to “unlock” the essence of the creative work, to be able to analyse the ongoing processes.
Life is a unique process in time, and memory is the most important phenomenon of the human dimension, sometimes so difficult and unwished. Memory does not let us go – it evokes memories and experiences, it makes us constantly experience the sensitivity of the soul, and, as we move away from youth, reflect on ourselves and the time in which we were, we are, and we will be.
The portrait of the unnamed time is a state of mind, the generalisation of our life that has already happened. It emerges on the long road of human nature and identity recognition – between nascent and accumulated experience, between birth and death, searching of answers, looking for one’s identity, drawing on the already existing experience. The memory of the dead and the signs of the era are revised by time and the living. Memory always returns to the past…
Aleksandras Ostašenkovas
The exhibition is presented by the Association of Visual Art Creators
Partners:
Šiauliai Aušra Museum
The Photography Museum
Sponsors:
Lithuanian Council for Culture
Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania
UAB Splius
AB Šiaulių bankas
UAB Elga