As part of the 12th music and art festival “Daugavpils ReStArt 2023”, from October 6 to 27, the exhibition “Apocalypse in Liege” by photographer Aļnias Stakles will be on display in the art gallery “Baltais zirgs” (Nikolaja iela 9). The exhibition will feature digitally created collages created by the artist using freely available images from the collections of art museums, scientific institutions and image banks. The opening of the exhibition will take place on October 6 at 15.00, free entry.
We live in an ocularcentric culture where constellations of historical and contemporary images are often more significant than reality. Because what is reality these days if not an incomprehensible set of images. Images are the basis for knowledge transfer, collective memory, entertainment, cultural cognition and ultimately provide endless opportunities to return to the same events, persons and objects to discover ever new interpretations of the past. At the same time, the world of images is becoming more saturated every moment, and our ability to grasp and understand it is becoming more limited every moment. To put it poetically, the map has become wider than the territory.
Thanks to the development of communication technologies, we can now access almost all the visual culture that humanity has accumulated, and not only access, but often have canonized objects and images in our digital archive. Today, when each of us has become a producer and a teller of visual stories to express ourselves, draw attention to ourselves, publicly wallow in melancholic feelings on social media, make money, engage in citizen journalism, etc., access to the world of images is no longer a privilege, but a self-evident tradition.
“I am interested in the fates of canonized images of art, science and journalism and their potential to contain contemporary meanings. Institutions that select, amass, and consciously create collections of images in art, science, and journalism have acquired an authoritative status in culture. The collections of these institutions are a priori considered a “gold fund” of visual culture that should be preserved for the future. My collages use images from open access art museum collections, scientific institutions and various image banks whose accumulated images can be considered as iconic evidence of the era and the past. The collages are based on the search for syntactic visual language connections between images of different eras, media and branches of visual culture. In the collages, persistent ideological and technical codes are used in visual communication, which are able to cross the boundaries of eras, media and cultures. Connections between different periods and media of visual culture can be traced by focusing on poses and gestures of persons, color scenographies, similar scopes of objects and architecture.
The technical performance of collages is based on the algorithms of image post-processing tools, allowing them to prevail over the accuracy and precision of the separation of image fragments. In this way, the technological features of digital post-processing become part of the ideological and technical code of the collages,” says the artist.
Alnis Stakle (1975) is a Latvian photographer and an assistant professor at the Department of Communication Studies at Riga Stradins University, head of the study programs “Photography” and “Multimedia Communication”. Stakle has obtained a doctorate degree in the field of pedagogical sciences at Daugavpils University. In more than twenty years of creative activity, Alnis Stakle mainly works in the genre of landscape and still life, but has also focused on self-portraits and archival interpretation. Since 1998, his works have been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Latvian Museum of Photography, the Latvian National Art Museum, the Modern Art Center in Oxford (GB), the Winzavod art center in Moscow (RU), the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires (AR), Arts in the “BOZAR” center in Brussels (BE), as well as in private and public collections. His work has been published in GUP, British Journal of Photography, Wired, Camera Austria, EYEMAZING, IMAGO, OjodePez, Archivo, Leica Fotografie International.
The XII Music and Art Festival “Daugavpils ReStArt 2023” is organized by:
Daugavpils state city municipal institution “Vienības nams”, Daugavpils Cultural Support Society, Stanislav Brok Daugavpils Music High School, Daugavpils Palace of Culture. Supported by the municipality of Daugavpils state city.
We inform you that the festival events are photographed and filmed for publicity and historical purposes. Information: www.daugavpilsrestart.lv, www.vnfestivals.lvwww.daugavpils.lv, www.vienibasnams.lv
2023-09-29 12:25:59
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