On 25 June, the first day of the Toruń (Poland) Days celebrations, the Black Wall Gallery of Photography opened an exhibition and hosted a presentation of the new photographic album “Kaunas. City of Modernism”. The event, which brought together an exceptionally large audience, was not only an introduction to the publication, but also a moment when the city’s architecture began to speak a different language – a visual one, articulated through light and form.
The album, composed of photographs by Gintaras Česonis, offers not a coherent narrative history of architecture, but a visual narrative in which Kaunas appears as a process – a cityscape in which modernism is expressed not only through forms, but also through their repetition, rhythmicity, fractures and pauses. It is not a single portrait of the city, but rather a disassembled and reassembled body of the city, seen from the inside: through the geometry of a window, the turn of a staircase, the sighs of a facade.
The exhibition in Toruń took on a specific meaning – here, where the cities of central Europe recognise the structures of modernism in their own way, Kaunas becomes part of a more general historical and visual experience. The album, supplemented with texts by architectural historians – Marija Drėmaitė, Vaidas Petrulis, Žilvinas Rinkšelis – is not a guide. It is a composition close to a fugue: without a strict chronology, with recurring motifs and deliberately left gaps, as if inviting the reader to intervene.
As the editor herself has said,
“The juxtapositions are not to make it easier, but to reveal the regularities of architectural expression. A keen-eyed reader will recognise this. And maybe even surprised.”
The exhibition and the publication are an invitation to look slowly. To observe not so much the buildings, but the very possibility of seeing modernity itself.
The initiators of the publication are the Kaunas branch of the Lithuanian Architects’ Association and Kaunas Photography Gallery.
The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Kaunas City Municipality.
The patron of Kaunas Photography Gallery is AON.