18 May 2021

Personal exhibition of Malvina Jelinskaitė “Ex nihilo. Accidentally and Paradoxically”

The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania is delighted to invite you to the personal photography exhibition of Malvina Jelinskaitė “Ex nihilo. Accidentally and Paradoxically” (Ex nihilo. Atsitiktinai ir paradoksaliai). M. Jelinskaitė is one of the few abstract photography artists in Lithuania whose philosophical and spontaneous work encourages the visitor to explore personal imagination boundaries.

“I believe that my spontaneous attempts to set imagination free starts with letting your mind and consciousness dissipate, or with the Socratic “I know that I know nothing”. The photographic reality that I create stems from the need to get closer to the boundaries of one’s individual identity and to open new forms of identity for oneself or even for others,” said the artist.

According to the art critic Kęstutis Šapoka, “<...> The photography mediation practices of Malvina Jelinskaitė is toeing the line between what I call the attempt to grasp what cannot be grasped and to capture what is invisible to the naked eye, and the attempt to avoid capturing what can be captured, and to avoid seeing what is obvious.”

The main question that M. Jelinskaitė’s exhibition wishes to address can be formulated as follows: how do I, as an artist, create awareness? What role does photography play in creating this awareness? How does photographic memory work? What is the source of one’s individual identity and what defines it?

The blurry images created by M. Jelinskaitė encourage visitors to experience the voids existing beyond the objects seen in the photographs, the relations between various objects, lines and shapes as well as the relation between that which is concrete and that which is illusion.

Brief information about the exhibition

Date

21 May – 5 September

Time

National Library’s opening hours

Venue

atrium, 5th floor

Participation

free entrance

More

on Facebook

Organiser

Malvina Jelinskaitė

Partners and sponsors

partner: Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, sponsor: Lithuanian Council for Culture