You Can Call Him Another Man
Maria Kapajeva
The Kaunas Photography Gallery
English
Texted by Italo Calvino, from the novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
Softcover
108 pages
185 x 235 mm
2018
ISBN 9786098099287
The project started with a box of negatives the artist found at her parents’ house a few years ago. There were about 200 processed and unprocessed films, shot by her father. Maria excavated their contents, delving deeper into the lost images of her father’s life, to create her own stories by using these photographs he took before his marriage to the artist’s mother and her birth. Maria let herself enter into the world of a young man she never knew, and find connections in what possibly cannot be connected with the help of Italo Calvino’s words from his novel ‘If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller’. With this work, she continues her artistic exploration of questions about found images and archives, and how a coincidence can lead to a new narrative that does not relate perhaps to the real events in these photographs. It is the artist’s way to build up ‘a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future’, described by Hal Foster.
It has started as a dummy book with title Reading Apocrypha. The dummy was shortlisted for FOAM Dummy Award (2016), TOP 10 of Self-Publish Riga (2016) and ‘Rock Your Dummy’ at Le PhotoBookFest in Paris (2015). In June 2018 the book was published under a new title You can call him another man. Here you can see various installation shots: at every new place I create a new story, a new narrative, which exists only once.
(source: https://shop.kaunasgallery.lt/en/product/maria-kapajeva-you-can-call-him-another-man/)
About the Artist
Maria Kapajeva is an artist who works between the UK and Estonia, while exhibiting her works internationally. Through her artistic practice, Kapajeva looks at the identity questions of peoples being in-between or in-transition, often bringing peripheral stories to the visible centre. Kapajeva practice is multidisciplinary: she works with found and vernacular photographic images, video installations, textile and embroidery and participatory practices.
Currently, she is doing a practice-based PhD at Estonian Academy of Arts that focuses on autotheoretical artistic practice.
https://www.mariakapajeva.com/
(source: https://www.mariakapajeva.com/about)
About the Publisher
The Kaunas Photography Gallery was opened in 1979 by the Lithuanian Photographers Association, which from 1969 to 1990 was a highly influential organisation, and the only one of its kind in all the former Soviet Union. The exhibition space was completely renovated in 2010. Its expanded activities, including exhibiting, residencies and pubishing, explores the very borders of photography, between traditional and conceptual camera-based art. Eventually, the gallery became traditional and conceptual camera-based art. Eventually, the gallery became the most relevant institution in the region focusing on photographic and contemporary art. The Kaunas Photography Gallery extends the long publishing tradition in Lithuania, and now not only concentrates on simply presenting photographers, but also on continuing research into Lithuanian photography through individual perception. Thanks to its successful publishing activities, Lithuanian photography is winning greater recognition than ever before. It is gradually becoming more acknowledged on the international scene, and is featured at major international photography book events.
https://kaunasgallery.lt/en/category/news/
