On 25 April, 6PM Irmantas Kovaliovas’ personal photography exhibition, titled “(POC) Praiseworthy Observant Citizen: Mobilography between Habit and Intention” will open at Kaunas Photography Gallery.
Is the mobile phone just a means of communication or a new camera that changes not only the aesthetics of the image, but also its perception? Irmantas Kovaliovas’ exhibition invites us to look at such questions without preconceptions. This is not only the author’s first solo exhibition, but also an attempt to articulate mobility as a conscious, conceptual act that forgoes speed for depth of gaze. “POC” or “Praiseworthy Observant Citizen” is the codename under which Irmantas’ exhibition was conceived, transforming fragments of everyday life into silent but compelling visual reflections on presence, vision and the search for domestic beauty.
Irmantas Kovaliovas’ work is a sequential, slow wandering through the surface of everyday life, where even a few metres can become a meditation of more than a ten-minute gaze. “Nowadays, I often walk even a short distance not for a minute, but for twenty,” the artist admits. This approach betrays not just a visual sensibility, but an aesthetic strategy based on patience, repetition and a kind of ritualism. These images are not documentary but rather poetic, often abstract, sometimes even painterly.
Kovaliovas has a long-standing following on Instagram, and has appeared in the exhibition space at the Dusetai Gallery and the Šiauliai Museum. However, this particular exhibition marks a new phase – an attempt to rethink what a “photographer” is today and what it means to “take photographs”.
With this project, Kaunas Photography Gallery not only introduces a new author, but also proposes to join a debate that has been going on for some time: can mobility become not only a technical term, but also an artistic position?
The exhibition will run until 26 May.
The exhibition is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Kaunas City Municipality. Kaunas Photography Gallery is sponsored by AON.