Photographer Algimantas Kunčius still continues his series Vilnius Puzzles, started in the 1960s, with the only difference that his old camera (Zeiss Ikon, eight 6x9 cm shots per film roll) now captures the new times. In fact, the author is not a sharp-eyed detective or a fierce hunter of events; rather, he is a casual, slightly curious flâneur. Yet there is more under this guise of an innocent observer - the inner tension of an aesthete and a philosopher, which manifests itself in the precisely organised photographic form, comprised of elements of (intra / extra) being and (self-)memory.

In this newest installment of the ongoing series, titled Reconstructions and exhibited for the first time, the photographer reveals several semantic layers: the documentary one, where he captures urban change - the destructive bustle of urbanisation that replaces the traditional signs of the slumbering cityscape; the chimerical one, where the photographer's own relationship with the space is altered - change highlights the transient nature of all being and causes metaphysical angst; the aesthetic one, where the author himself changes, balancing between romanticism and drama, between the discipline of the shot and chaos. Nevertheless, one could hardly call this an attempt to escape from oneself; on the contrary, Algimantas Kunčius' photographic power to master reality only grows.

Curator Margarita Matulytė