Arunas Kulikauskas

The Last One

Avoiding the pretentious word „retrospective”, Arunas Kulikauskas’ „The Last One” exhibition should be called a review. The author’s work consists of different historical, cultural and expressive layers: from the beginning of the Soviet era with a different approach to classical photography and its ways of expression to the New York period – the poetry of the capitalist world mega polis and Jonas Mekas’ Anthology Film Archives, Polaroid photography, pinhole photography and camera production, capturing rural everyday life in blog photography (everyday – “now” – capturing) or slow (e.g., half-year exposure per frame) solar path photography.

In „The Last One” exhibition, Arunas Kulikauskas reviews his four-decade-long creative period with a free look and form. Inventory a rich creative archive. But do not try to scrupulously sort, classify, or chronologize it. Rather, the author carefully examines what he has, what has survived – as if translating a family photo album. When something pulls out what matters, it blows away the dust: here I am small, ruby ​​and bare, here young, green and angry. Here I am, having lived a piece of life when I realized something – that expensive things are simple, and the basis is always the same.

The three main axes of the exhibition are: the last works of the Soviet period; a twenty-year creative period while living in New York; almost a decade of creation after returning to Lithuania and settling in the countryside – telephography, blog photography.

There are two important things to look out for when viewing an exhibition. First, “The Last One” exhibition has free and changing forms: the exposition prepared for the beginning of the opening will be constantly formed and filled by the author. Her final image should take place in the last week. “The Last One” is a changing, growing, cultivated exhibition.

Second, The Last is a contextual exhibition in which the author seeks to show the context of his work and life as a single fabric. The author includes in the exhibition what was important to him at one time or another, influenced, lived and worked nearby, was under his eyes. Therefore, let the viewer not be surprised to see in the exhibition not only A. Kulikauskas, but also his youthful comrades, young photographers or his wife’s works, a picture of an unknown author from a second hand shop or even a household item.

For the first time, A. Kulikauskas is organizing a large-scale exhibition of his own. Has he managed to cope with such a liberal concept of the exhibition? Arunas is an old-cut rebel, or at least a non-conformist, so he really doesn’t turn his head about it. Not to create correctly, „by the rules” – what is fashionable, modern, going, but to touch the Unknown – is one of the essential criteria of art for the author.