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The Museum of Photography will have a solo exhibition dedicated to Elna Stakle’s China

From August 27 to October 4, the exhibition halls of the Latvian Museum of Photography will feature a solo exhibition by the photographer Alnis Stakles “Neither a Horse nor a Tiger”, the museum’s representatives informed the portal “Delfi”.

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The photos in the exhibition were taken during several trips to China from 2013 to 2017.

As the creators of the exhibition remind, China is one of the largest countries on the planet, it has the largest population in the world, the second largest economy, the largest army with significant geopolitical ambitions in Asia and the world as a whole. It is also one of the few countries where communist ideology has still not lost its influence. News headlines In Western cultures, China is often presented in a less flattering way – human rights violations, labor camps, ecological problems, militarization, one-party dictatorships and the like. The images created by Stakle do not exclude all of the above, but the reasons for their creation, according to the artist himself, cannot be sought in order to reproduce the sensational searches characteristic of photojournalism.

Perhaps the language of photography used is not meant to be discovered, but rather to surprise and provide viewing pleasure, even in situations where the reality depicted is frightening. The sparkling skyscraper landscapes of the night city are not really so coveted when you look at the crumbling holes in the walls of the buildings, created in the spirit of communist construction, using poor quality materials or due to the negligence of the builders. The only watering option for properly dug and arranged small gardens is a tar-like rat flowing next to the ditch. Dancers, whose romantic intimacy every night often ends on the same evening, when the regular evening exercise in the shade of a newly built fence ends. Unfortunately, the paternalism of the language of photography denies access to reality and leaves only one’s imagination. Everything that arises in the viewer’s thoughts when looking at the pictures is important in this exhibition.

“Alnis Stakle’s works are about China and the coincidences that mark everyone’s path. Their visual rhetoric focuses on how people identify with a particular place or situation, what rituals serve to establish social ties, and where there are private and collective boundaries. “The truest way to discover the spirit of place and time is to be able to see the special simple and mundane, which is also the basis of these works,” writes the creators of the exhibition.

Alnis Stakle (1975, Latvia) is a Latvian photographer and professor at Riga Stradiņš University, Department of Communication Studies. Stakle holds a doctorate in pedagogical sciences from Daugavpils University. Since 1998, his works have been widely exhibited, including solo and group exhibitions at the Latvian Museum of Photography, the Latvian National Museum of Art, the Modern Art Center in Oxford (GB), the Winzavod Art Center in Moscow (RU), and the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires (AR). , At the BOZAR Art Center in Brussels (BE), as well as in private and public collections. His works have been published in the British Journal of Photography, Wired, Camera Austria, EYEMAZING, IMAGO, OjodePez, Archivo, Leica Fotografie International. She can learn more about the photographer Homepage.

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