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II–V 10 am. – 6.00 pm. / VI–VII 11.00 am. – 5.00 pm.
Ticket – 5 €, with discount 2,50 € / Guided tour – 20 €, no discounts are available € / Visit of the roof terrace 1 €, with discount 0,50 €
Vilniaus str. 140, LT-76296, Šiauliai
Bike rental station is available on the museum’s opening hours
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Permanent exhibition of history of photography called Freedom for photography art (Lith. „Laisvę fotografijai“)
Ongoing and upcoming exhibitions
Archive of past exhibitions
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On May 16, 2025, at 5:00 p.m., the Museum of Photography (Vilniaus St. 140, Šiauliai) will open a photography exhibition by Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė “Slidūs akmenys” (“The rocks are slippery”). The exhibition will run until June 29, 2025.
This text rolls down in lines and words like my stone, which I am cursed to unsuccessfully roll up the mountain ridge. If you follow these gravity-driven sentences and descend with them to the very bottom, you may find that the texts, images and ambitions in your world are infinite, unlike the world itself, with all its useful and precious stones, people and life.
No matter how gently liquid crystals are moved around screens, no matter how forcefully toxic carbon-fibre rockets are spewed out into space or other countries’ territories, these stones intrusively return with dangerous landslides of greater desires or pain. Perhaps, unlike me, you still have the choice not to roll these boulders pointlessly? Despite the lessons from myths and legends, a part of humanity still endeavours to conquer real and imagined peaks that are not theirs, to be the first to raise flags there, to break off a piece of a star with an outstretched hand, and to cheat death. This is a Sisyphean persistence that often distracts the mind from obsessive inertia. But every pursuit of conquest, whether ideological or physical, requires fire, and afterwards, it is followed by a trail of black dust.
The same ash veil enshrouded stones and mountains born from the wedding of heat and pressure. At that time, there were no humans here yet and no one counted time on Earth according to the human. The solidifying folds of lava were then forming the land body and competed with water for territory. Heavens and earths, born in the eternal struggle, eventually taught the human to move vertically – to push oneself upwards and roll into depth – in fact, to roll this planetary hot stone to the rhythm of Sisyphean labour. However, the Earth, rotated without a moment’s respite, has worn out. The traces of cars on its dusty roads are no longer surprising, nor its limpid blue ice that has not melted yet is exciting – life here is enjoyed less and less.
The man’s dream of reclaiming the unseen and the time of the unnamed beginning of everything no longer lives on Earth, but in the mines of other planets. Fantasy polygons are needed for more Rovers stirring up sharp dust of the lunar surface to reach these dream fuel stations. Already now, these earthly analogues of the cosmic landscape are being used for training us to roll our lives in harsh conditions exceeding the limits of human experience.
But what if everything turns upside down, and the Earth pretends to be the Moon, while the Moon pretends to be the Earth; humans pretend to be aliens, and aliens pretend to be humans; life pretends to be death, and death pretends to be life? Does that mean that I no longer roll my stone but the stone rolls me? Are these us behind the glass, not trophies and postcards, watching documents being exchanged between the Earth scorched by wars and the extra-terrestrial space that was announced a haven of peace as recently as in the 1960s?
Jogintė Bučinskaitė
Not only art historians can write about Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė’s work, but also sisyphuses or rare minerals, the Moon’s south pole permanently in the shadow and the research probes floundering in it. Long after us, the artist’s photographic stones will be broken down by lithotrophic bacteria – creatures that have lived on rocks for 2,1 billion years and have known the Earth longer than any other life form.
G. M. Kinčinaitytė’s interplanetary photography hovers between the human and machine gaze, between the moment and planetary time, between the desire for discovery and the mourning of disappearance. Dark images of the scorched Earth and documents of the lunar landscape from NASA archives exchange names and motives. The artist juxtaposes and searches for analogies between harsh earthly areas and the relief of the planetary satellite: between coagulated volcanic lava strands and meteorite crater wells, an ash-covered melting glacier and a struggling mystery under a thick shell of cosmic dust. However, these fractal images creating the impression of abstract (photo)graphics also hide exploitative intentions of colonial expansion.
The exhibitions “Nusėta juodomis dulkėmis” (“Littered with black dust”, Gallery Vartai) and “Slidūs akmenys” (“The rocks are slippery”, The Photography Museum) present the artist’s new works and moving image installations, raising questions on the topics of the New Space Age, when space and the Moon are no longer an arena of mysterious symbols but rather a field of commercial interests and economic development. It is a place of potential escape, promising to resolve many of the earthly mistakes.
As in the previous project “Tu priklausai man” (“You Belong to Me”, ongoing since 2014), in the author’s book “Sunless Seas of Ice”, published a decade later (2024), the geology of Iceland becomes a starting point for a planetary thinking that offers a language of coexistence, transcends configurations of nation-states, connects the past and future of space exploration, and responds to the ecological crisis and economic competition.
Author of the exhibition text: Jogintė Bučinskaitė
Exhibition architect: Martynas Gailiušas
Exhibition communication designer: Darius Linkevičius
Organiser: The branch of Šiauliai Aušra Museum – The Photography Museum
The project is funded by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania