Vytautas Kumža

Solo exhibition ECHO at CODA museum in Apeldoorn.

By deploying photographic strategies, which converge into sculptural installations, Vytautas Kumza marks soft relationship
between the physical world and its different forms of representation. It is about the spatial and intuitive-based ways of
staging memories encapsulated into archived objects. He extracts them from their original functional context (the archive), which is meant to reckon, but they’re forgotten. It raises a question: “Do we remember things as they were, or do we distort them into new stories, functionalities, and images in our heads?”. This exhibition is a collage of manipulated relations that deal with the past and point to a reverted future. New gazes for imaginations open.

Memory is fragile. In this case, the innate human capacity of remembering comes and goes, with interruptions, in different, sometimes opposite, currents. Clashes are provoked. Inspirations for the new works are taken from the CODA museum archive of historical objects. Forgotten items are unarchived, and imprints are made out of them onto the glass. The glass, the medium for preservation in artworks, is already a material pushed to the limits from its primary function in Kumza’s work. In this
exhibition, the experimentation around it is investigated furtherly. Using CODA’s ExperienceLab, the artist reproduces the
objects through glass engravement. The representation of these objects on glass juxtaposes and creates a new (dysfunctional)
interaction with the image by interfering with the viewer. What is produced is a new context and method on how to read an
artwork. Objects are charged with memories in these traces that appear and disappear. A collection of new possible scenarios and situations. But, mostly, misleading stories.

The intention behind is to make the space even more transparent for the viewers. Glass modular systems were
site-specifically made for the exhibition by intervening directly in the space. They were used to display the works. Glass is not normally used for this purpose due to its precarity and breakability. The gesture of adding another layer resulted in
reverberating an echo in the space coming from the artworks: like a prosthesis, which releases a feeling of spaciousness and more fragility at the same Ime. The architecture and functionality of the space are not just duplicated or extended, but it is re-represented in a dialogue with the artworks. The architectural joints are made visible, transparent, and augmented.

As part of the collection becomes printed and tangible, an intervention in the sealings is made by replacing them with
custom-made glass panels. The immaterial space in between is occupied by objects and appliances, which are normally covered up, but now materialize and are filtered through the glass as a medium to perceive. Sealings become a third window in the space standing above us. It is an aquarium of forgotten objects where the viewers, wherever they look, can see and depict what’s
hidden behind.

I heard the noise of a shattering window, but I didn't find any glass on the floor: ‘Maybe, something broke inside me. My body is a shattered window'.

'Objects in the mirror are closer, then they appear' is the first solo exhibition of Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kumža at Galerie Martin van Zomeren. It tackles the spatial, situational, and sculptural possibilities given by the passage of a presence, which already becomes an absence. The exhibition is an assemblage of manipulated situations that question those doubts arising after a breaking-in scene: 'When did it start? How did it end?'. The objects and the space are irreversibly marked by this incident releasing a new subtle reality. Every corner has proof of damage: they are all traces of a mystery. Objects liquify or heavily reconstruct themselves with new functionality. Forgotten objects are taken out of their context and immersed into ambiguous parallel energies: soft and firm, ungraspable and contained, light and dark.

Kumža shows a series of new twisted photographic works combined with sculptural objects and installations in the space. The practice behind the exhibition presents a possible dialogue between glass and photography: the glass is the tool for preserving a print, like a screen. But, in this case, it instigates the sharpness and potential harmfulness given by its physical element. In this exhibition, the glass, the invisible presence preceding the photographs, becomes visible, present, as a scalpel cutting the meanings behind every image. Glass isn't used as a material but as an expression of many temporal stages. It places the viewer not just in an observational position but also to speculate around new meanings, ending up in imaginary stories.

AFTER THE DAY
"Is it over yet?"

Exhibition addresses the state in between fiction and reality; a vision, a problem, a dream, a nightmare, a hangover, a miracle. The laminal space between the lost past and the unknown future. Something that is forgotten but, all of the sudden, it becomes remembered. In this exhibition, Kumža shows a series of new twisted photographic works that are combined with sculptural objects and installations in the space, while evoking a feeling of anxiety and pointing out to a spread sense of fragility. It affects our senses and understandings in new and slippery ways.

Kumža immerses us within visual contexts and ungraspable situations where the viewer observes familiar objects and reflect on them by assigning new functionalities and possibilities. These objects are mundane and they go through a radical transformative process. They end up combined with other materials and objects which generate new meanings and stories. Kumža is interested in how we perceive gestures and symbols through emotions that we attach to objects around us.

Series of these photographic stained glass works rethinks various daily processes around as well as force the viewer to question the logic of his vision. Pandemic created its own imagination, whose narratives flooded screens, urban spaces out of social relations. In the world of the post, the new form of imagination was gaining momentum, but its contours were blurring. Misleading physical and emotional instability is raising the question, “Is observation can change the very nature of things or give them another meaning?”. These photographic structures consisting of an image placed behind sealed glass pieces creating physical distance and a barrier in front of the viewer. It has an impacts to visibility by spreading it's colour onto a photograph. Glass construction through which we look at the image becomes an indication that we look through someone's constructed "filter" of vision.

In this solo exhibition at Prospekto Gallery in Vilnius, Vytautas Kumža presents the latest photographic works, which he combines with sculptural objects of similar logic in the space. Interested in the materiality of the environment from which our cognitive experience originates, Kumža uses different production processes to destroy, remove, or recombine as an opportunity to emerge an alternative.

It often captures and reinforces the feeling of absurdity or strangeness in unstable, illusory and sometimes deceptive moments of everyday life. The main focus is not in people, but in the traces they leave and what meaning it holds.

Works can be seen as the study of causes and effects or different ways in which simple gestures can change the position of an object and have important consequences for that. Kumža uses an arsenal of various instruments to transform deeply resonating carriers of meaning. Using a variety of materials - photographs, glass, epoxy, hair, mirror and colored foil, the artist creates a strange resonance environment, a space of reflection that disrupts the relationship of everyday objects.

This exhibition is reminiscent of the process of photosynthesis, like a greenhouse space. It becomes an ecosystem offering to rethink beliefs or abandon prejudices.

Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela

Lithuanian Photographers Association is financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Exhibition sponsored: by Mondrian Fonds.
Exhibitions partner: The Rooster Gallery.
Graphic design: Laslo Strong.
Acknowledgement: Gabriel Lester.

The exhibition Smeared States explored the condition of mimicry as a strategic appropriation rather than a mere camouflage. “We won’t fade into” was commissioned by Showroom MAMA and responds to the theme of the show by problematizing the illusion of depth and the glossiness of the surface through an exploration of urban advertising scenes. The work was compiled by collecting different gestures from the city; (un)expected artistic expressions, amateur workarounds and diy-solutions for presenting photography. In four aluminium displays, the photographic images bring to the foreground the visual noise (tags, stickers, graffiti) that often covers advertisements found in urban spaces. The photography itself is staged to simulate the way corporate advertising aestheticizes mundane objects and everyday scenes. The installation of the work alludes to spaces of transition; lobbies, airports as well as subway and train stations, by mimicking their architecture. The installation disguises the banality of the content of advertising by the added playful interventions on the surface of the screens. The piece makes the construction of the photographic stage visible bringing the background forwards while concealing parts of the foreground. The work complicates the relationship between flatness and three-dimensionality by bringing to the surface the artificial nature of what we often consider as natural or normal. The piece urges one to excavate their gaze and notice the interventions that infiltrate urban advertising making evident how the noise is absorbed within the images themselves.

Supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture, Showroom MAMA

The exhibition showcases a range of work that focuses on creating embodied experiences with the use of presentation displays and sculptural spatial elements. The photography is staged with tools and objects already present within the studio as a way to limit the content but also find unusual ways to reinvent it. The images, already layered in their production, get further obscured through the use of elaborate displays. Perforated wooden wall panels act as the background for some photographs while chewing gum-like grey corners made out of clay create DIY frames for others. Threading the fine line between trompe-l'œi and fine art photography the work creates deceitful constructions that provoke and perplex. The subject of the photographs as well as the enigmatic installation oscillates between absurdity, encryption and transcription, antagonizing the functionality that undercuts the way photography is presented. Photographs are not just flat pieces of paper that exist up against a wall. Photographs are objects, and they’re tucked in the corner of the mirror in your bedroom, they are inside your wallet or shoved in the insides of books. Photographs are objects that exist in relationship to other objects. That’s why photography is not a single act, but can be seen more as a chain of decisions starting with the idea and ending with the form of presentation, often exposing the craftsmanship behind each image.

The work “Don’t fall in love with a prop” was presented at Unfair’18 and featured a collaboration with the poet Maria Barnas. The resulting poem was designed and printed by designer Eduardo Leon in the form of a notepad with removable pages for the visitors to take home. The work was inspired by a chapter in a beginner’s guide to photography called ‘Don’t Fall in Love with a Prop’ and operates as a visual how-to-guide for the viewer. The exhibition simulates DIY instructions for making a photographic studio in an amateur environment, suggesting various techniques, tips and tricks to construct the space and the tools. Some of the gadgets reimagined in the photographs only serve a speculative aesthetic function rather than being utilitarian photographic tools themselves. With the use of didactics, object repetition, and subverting the objects’ functionality, the visitor is invited in a makeshift studio space made by a series of fictional and often dysfunctional props. The work is a response to the ubiquity of seamless digital images and the heavy reliance of photography on image rendering and post-production. The work appropriates tools, techniques and themes of commercial photography in unorthodox ways, exposing their mechanics. The situations constructed problematize the limitations of photography as a medium by making visible the artificial nature of its staging. By revealing what lies behind the scenes, the work both exposes but also celebrates the tentative process of the construction of photographic imagery.

This series is a part of “Tricks and Trade secrets”, photographs that create enigmatic constructs, which both deceive our eyes and invite us to decipher their meaning. Disguised as glossy magazine photos, the images lure the viewer in a world of trickery and encryption by obfuscating the subjects in a variety of ways. With the use of simulacra, visual illusions, extended displays, and use of distorted scales the photographs re-imagine otherwise mundane and familiar objects. The work focuses on interventions in everyday situations that result in the manipulation of the physical, temporal and aesthetic laws of the subjects within the images. The resulting three-dimensionality of the images is carefully constructed through flat imagery that appear multi-dimensional either through overlay of layers or manual manipulation of their surfaces. The objects within the photos are being obscured, twisted, folded and blurred confusing the viewer’s gaze. These simulations create a space of suspension in which the beholder can only linger and experience the present moment. By provoking the performativity of depth and surface both in the way three-dimensionality is constructed as a series of flatnesses, and in the misleading interplay of background and foreground within images, the installations beckon: ‘Look. Yes, look again, and longer this time.’ The imagery includes interruptions in landscapes and logic, ironic reversals of the expected, illusion and magic reminding the audience that they are indeed looking at a photograph, and not at the thing being photographed.