From August 22, Milda Drazdauskaitė’s exhibition “Ladies, grannies and everyone else” is open at Kaunas Photography Gallery. The exhibition will run until 25 September.
Milda Drazdauskaitė is a barely presented and researched Lithuanian photographer, who has worked in changing historical circumstances, at the intersection between classical humanist photography and the “conceptualists”. This liminality is both her strength and her stumbling block. Since 1978, the artist began to participate in exhibitions and to work for the Lithuanian Society of Photographers, some of her works have toured a number of European galleries, and even Antanas Sutkus entrusted his prints to her hands.
Drazdauskaitė’s choice to take “photos for memory” testifies to an auto/ironic and conceptual approach to photography – a way to overcome the resistance of the models and not to deny the authorship of the photographer. Milda Drazdauskaitė’s work, like that of her contemporaries and colleagues Algirdas Šeškus, Alfonsas Budvytis, Vytautas Balčytis and Gintaras Zinkevičius, should be reconsidered within the context of contemporary art and photography. The author’s works are characterised by obvious posing, performances of a more beautiful life for models, highlighting the absurdity of everyday life, the dissonance between what we are and what we want to look like.
The exhibition focuses on the artist’s favourite characters – the ladies and the grannies. Unlike the first time the exhibition was presented at the Vilnius Photography Gallery, it also briefly looks back at everyone else posing next to them. Alongside the female archetypes, the casual and responsible posers, Milda’s personal “photos for memory” come to life – autobiographical shots from her personal archive – witnesses of a complex and expressive social and historical period.
The works are stored in the archive of the Lithuanian Photographers’ Association.
The exhibition is curated by Dalia Mikonytė.
Exhibition partner – Lithuanian Photographers’ Association.
The exhibition is partially supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Kaunas City Municipality and AON.