Month: October 2013

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Posted on by aimeemaephotography

I enjoyed looking at the work of these Chinese artists and found the cultural work interesting and unusual. My favorite piece was the installation at the Elysium gallery where we walked into a small room made to look like the center of a forest, we went in in small groups and stood up against the wall in anxiety and interested to see what’s going to happen as a small Chinese lady is crouched in the corner behind some artificial trees singing and humming. She gets up and walks towards us still singing, she came really close to us which made me feel uncomfortable but still excited to see more. She spoke in quiet voice in a strong accent so I found it extremely difficult trying to understand her, especially as she was still singing and humming in-between words and sentences. She pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and passed it to me, when I read it said to find a Chinese family living in Swansea and ask them questions, I haven’t done this task yet but I’m looking forward to trying it soon.

Posted on by aimeemaephotography

Photographic artist Indre Serpytyte was born in Lithuania, her work looks at the impact of Soviet occupation from 1944 onwards in her native country and more personally on her own family.  Her delicate images explore history, individual and collective memory and loss, relating to her family history and that of Lithuania.

 

The artist’s recent work 1944 – 1991 examines anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania. Her images show the memory of these events by visiting actual sites, including photographing the forests and former houses of NKVD-NKGB-MVD-MGB Soviet forces. Serptytyte created remarkable still-life photographs of small wooden model houses. I feel they work well in black and white as you focus more on the deatails.

I like that she displayed the model buildings alongside the images to show scale and reality.

 

In the series A State of Silence, Serpytyte questions official accounts of the untimely death of her father, a government official, in an apparent car accident. Considering that these are memorial photos they are very unsentimental, the glossy black backgrounds are highlighted by the glass frames giving them a glamorous appearance. To me they appear to be very impersonal from first impressions but I know they have a deeper meaning.