Vytautas Kumža

Where Light Leans
duo exhibition with GuNa at ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul

A standard functions as a common framework through which society distinguishes right from wrong and organizes itself. In environments shaped by the demand for clear answers and efficiency, many have unconsciously come to accept straightness as a sign of normality. But are the conditions given to everyone truly so seamless and fair? Where Light Leans stems from this fundamental question. Each body and perceptual system carries its own contours and fluctuations, while the relationships formed with surrounding beings continuously shift rather than settle into fixed states. The exhibition turns its attention to the narratives that surface when accepted notions of universality are unsettled and the binary gaze begins to fracture.

Amsterdam based Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kumža subverts photography’s documentary nature. Rather than capturing a specific scene as it is, he constructs surreal situations by distorting the scale, function, and proportion of his subjects. For him, photography is not a medium that fixes reality onto a flat surface, but a material through which he intervenes in three dimensional space. This reflects a desire to recover direct contact with the object, something often lost in contemporary photography, and to merge the photographic realm with the real world. Printed images and physical objects are combined into assemblage like forms, where collected items are reconfigured beyond their original functions and familiar meanings. Together with the optical illusion produced by the photograph itself, these arrangements actively engage the viewer’s perception.

The artist’s stage, where spatial hierarchies are overturned and conflicting materialities collide, unfolds as a deliberately constructed fiction. A bicycle chain attached to a plate bearing a dog’s face evokes bondage, escape, and fractured loyalty (Wasn’t me), while a trophy bound with a necktie and suspended upside down suggests the inversion of value (Sight beneath the silence). Elsewhere, the image of a collapsed yet intact house of cards points toward the notion of a safe failure (Brief escape), and a silver duck that shifts its appearance according to the reflected landscape raises questions about how easily identity is refracted through its surroundings (Quiet persuasion). His multifocal lens serves as a device that exposes the fragility and instability of contemporary perception. Confronted with these plausible yet subtly disjointed hybrids, viewers are prompted to reconsider not only what they see, but also how belief and interpretation themselves are constructed.

In GuNa's work, there are neither rigid straight lines nor definitive curves. The fluid lines that freely proliferate throughout her works stem from what the artist describes as her own physical discomfort and unstable way of thinking. Such wavering is less a sign of anxiety or deficiency than a unique way of sensing the world. Her inner mind is deeply projected onto forms that substitute for eyes, faces, and bones. Everything that bulges outward, forms sharp angles, becomes fragmented, remains stagnant, or bears traces of corrosion serves as a clue to this sensibility. The artist has long observed a quince tree in the courtyard of her studio as it blooms and withers each year. Unlike ordinary fruits that ooze and collapse as they decay, the quince slowly dries while retaining moisture within itself. Encompassing the layered transformations of a substance that gradually shrinks over time before finally fading away, IvoryBlackBrownTorso visualizes the tenacious vitality within finitude that the artist has witnessed.

FRP (fiber reinforced plastic), commonly used in her sculptures, was originally developed as an industrial material and requires specific temperatures and mixing ratios for proper use. Deviating from these conditions leads to variations in thickness and color, while unexpected impurities can easily become embedded during the curing process. However, rather than meticulously refining these unintended results, the artist embraces the clues produced by chance and moves forward with them. This attitude is equally reflected in her paintings. The recurring word “Wagon” in the titles refers both to a vehicle that carries people or objects and to a protective shell surrounding the invisible interior of the body and mind. The uneven surfaces created in the process of hollowing out the wooden panel are often left as they are. Yet accepting these unpredictable moments does not imply arbitrary abandon, for beneath the restless traces lies an already solid structure. Believing that even irregular forms possess their own inherent archetype, the artist boldly weaves together the disparate shapes discovered within them.

The standards that claim universality may ultimately be nothing more than someone’s belief or an imposed illusion. The anomalies in this exhibition do not merely function as formal experiments seeking to resist visual conventions or overcome bodily limitations. Rather, they represent an attitude for perceiving and navigating a world filled with uncertainty. True balance is likely the continuous process of readjusting one’s center of gravity to avoid falling upon unstable ground. When we willingly deviate from the given path and lean ourselves off balance, instead of moving blindly forward, might we not finally illuminate the corners just beyond the elongated shadows?

Yoojin Lee (Curator, ThisWeekendRoom)

Images: Courtesy of the artist and ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul

OFFSCREEN Paris 2025
October 21-26

Presented by Copperfield (London) and Martin van Zomeren (Amsterdam) at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière in Paris.

Just as the surrealists highlighted in their paintings, when we think about our dreams we are sensitive to the objects that appeared in those scenes as we try to read them. Vytautas Kumza applies the same hypersensitivity to objects, their state and their placement in the waking world. Born into a precarious situation and a turbulent home life where emotions could change at the tip of a bottle, the artist’s childhood experiences taught him to read objects and the minutia of each scene; a gas hob left burning, a scared dog, a door left open and unlocked. In adult life he now couples this honed skill with studies in composition and psychology, to place objects in highly aestheticized relationships that are often instantly alluring but hold unspeakable tension. While still, these protagonists are often bodily in their rendering, fragile, tense; at once potentially sexual, potentially violent, potentially seductive, potentially abusive — emotions waiting for release.

Vytautas Kumža constructs realms out of contradiction to search for meaning within the fractured logic of daily life. Working often with photography, his work is often constructed as a sculptural installation that either doubles or antagonizes the spatial presentation of the images.

CIRCULATE – PHOTOGRAPHY BEYOND FRAMES
Oct 26 2024 until March 23 2025 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

For Circulate 21 artists were selected, all of whom use photography in unique and innovative ways, thinking beyond the frame. Their work also attests to the impact of the image in our daily lives. Many of the works in Circulate were created especially for the exhibition and will be on view for the first time. During the exhibition, the Stedelijk will announce which works will be acquired for the museum collection.

Photography has increasingly become a part of our lives; we produce and consume a constant flow of images. Also the status of photography as an art medium has shifted dramatically. The 21 artists included in Circulate use photography in unique and innovative ways, thinking beyond the frame. Their approach exceeds the technical realm; what matters is the meaning of the artwork. Carriers of the photographic image can take on myriad forms, varying from the classical photo paper to a stone or fabric, a digital form, a sculpture or a three-dimensional installation.

Images: Peter Tijhuis @Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Hollow is, first and foremostly, a question that troubles image-object relations. Hollow is, secondly, an artist book cum monograph that charts Vytautas Kumža’s practice, and the development of a singular yet open-ended visual language.

While Hollow composes itself around the potentials and limitations of the photographic ‘problem’, it likewise dispenses with any strict notion of the photographic. Through Kumža’s myriad experiments and treatments concerning the image, the work extends into realms of sculpture, performance and installation, in turn challenging the delineation of each medium. Sensitive to the format of a book, its dimensions and physical heft, Hollow is a joyous discovery of the image-object ‘event’.

Threaded through the publication is ‘X marks the spot’, a series of short fictions written by Elaine ML Tam.

You can order it at Free Pony Press or San Serriffe or Idea Books

Concept: Vytautas Kumža, Myrabelle Charlebois, Our Polite Society
Graphic design: Our Polite Society
Essay: Elaine ML Tam
Format: 220 × 275 mm
Number of pages: 480
Languages: English
Printing: Gutenberg Beuys Feindruckerei, Germany
Publication year: 2024
ISBN: 978-9-08322-743-6

Solo exhibition ECHO at CODA museum in Apeldoorn.

By deploying photographic strategies, which converge into sculptural installations, Vytautas Kumza marks soft relationship between the physical world and its different forms of representation. It is about the spatial and intuitive-based ways of staging memories encapsulated into archived objects. He extracts them from their original functional context (the archive), which is meant to reckon, but they’re forgotten. It raises a question: “Do we remember things as they were, or do we distort them into new stories, functionalities, and images in our heads?”. This exhibition is a collage of manipulated relations that deal with the past and point to a reverted future. New gazes for imaginations open.

Memory is fragile. In this case, the innate human capacity of remembering comes and goes, with interruptions, in different, sometimes opposite, currents. Clashes are provoked. Inspirations for the new works are taken from the CODA museum archive of historical objects. Forgotten items are unarchived, and imprints are made out of them onto the glass. The glass, the medium for preservation in artworks, is already material pushed to the limits from its primary function in Kumza’s work. In this exhibition, the experimentation around it is investigated furtherly. Using CODA’s ExperienceLab, the artist reproduces the objects through glass engravement. The representation of these objects on glass juxtaposes and creates a new (dysfunctional) interaction with the image by interfering with the viewer. What is produced is a new context and method on how to read an artwork. Objects are charged with memories in these traces that appear and disappear. A collection of new possible scenarios and situations. But, mostly, misleading stories.

The intention behind is to make the space even more transparent for the viewers. Glass modular systems were site-specifically made for the exhibition by intervening directly in the space. They were used to display the works. Glass is not normally used for this purpose due to its precarity and breakability. The gesture of adding another layer resulted in reverberating an echo in the space coming from the artworks: like a prosthesis, which releases a feeling of spaciousness and more fragility at the same time. The architecture and functionality of the space are not just duplicated or extended, but it is re-represented in a dialogue with the artworks. The architectural joints are made visible, transparent, and augmented.

As part of the collection becomes printed and tangible, an intervention in the sealings is made by replacing them with custom-made glass panels. The immaterial space in between is occupied by objects and appliances, which are normally covered up, but now materialize and are filtered through the glass as a medium to perceive. Sealings become a third window in the space standing above us. It is an aquarium of forgotten objects where the viewers, wherever they look, can see and depict what’s hidden behind.

I heard the noise of a shattering window, but I didn't find any glass on the floor: ‘Maybe, something broke inside me. My body is a shattered window'.

'Objects in the mirror are closer, then they appear' is the first solo exhibition of Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kumža at Galerie Martin van Zomeren. It tackles the spatial, situational, and sculptural possibilities given by the passage of a presence, which already becomes an absence. The exhibition is an assemblage of manipulated situations that question those doubts arising after a breaking-in scene: 'When did it start? How did it end?'. The objects and the space are irreversibly marked by this incident releasing a new subtle reality. Every corner has proof of damage: they are all traces of a mystery. Objects liquify or heavily reconstruct themselves with new functionality. Forgotten objects are taken out of their context and immersed into ambiguous parallel energies: soft and firm, ungraspable and contained, light and dark.

Kumža shows a series of new twisted photographic works combined with sculptural objects and installations in the space. The practice behind the exhibition presents a possible dialogue between glass and photography: the glass is the tool for preserving a print, like a screen. But, in this case, it instigates the sharpness and potential harmfulness given by its physical element. In this exhibition, the glass, the invisible presence preceding the photographs, becomes visible, present, as a scalpel cutting the meanings behind every image. Glass isn't used as a material but as an expression of many temporal stages. It places the viewer not just in an observational position but also to speculate around new meanings, ending up in imaginary stories.

AFTER THE DAY
"Is it over yet?"

Exhibition addresses the state in between fiction and reality; a vision, a problem, a dream, a nightmare, a hangover, a miracle. The laminal space between the lost past and the unknown future. Something that is forgotten but, all of the sudden, it becomes remembered. In this exhibition, Kumža shows a series of new twisted photographic works that are combined with sculptural objects and installations in the space, while evoking a feeling of anxiety and pointing out to a spread sense of fragility. It affects our senses and understandings in new and slippery ways.

Kumža immerses us within visual contexts and ungraspable situations where the viewer observes familiar objects and reflect on them by assigning new functionalities and possibilities. These objects are mundane and they go through a radical transformative process. They end up combined with other materials and objects which generate new meanings and stories. Kumža is interested in how we perceive gestures and symbols through emotions that we attach to objects around us.

Series of these photographic stained glass works rethinks various daily processes around as well as force the viewer to question the logic of his vision. Pandemic created its own imagination, whose narratives flooded screens, urban spaces out of social relations. In the world of the post, the new form of imagination was gaining momentum, but its contours were blurring. Misleading physical and emotional instability is raising the question, “Is observation can change the very nature of things or give them another meaning?”. These photographic structures consisting of an image placed behind sealed glass pieces creating physical distance and a barrier in front of the viewer. It has an impacts to visibility by spreading it's colour onto a photograph. Glass construction through which we look at the image becomes an indication that we look through someone's constructed "filter" of vision.

In this solo exhibition at Prospekto Gallery in Vilnius, Vytautas Kumža presents the latest photographic works, which he combines with sculptural objects of similar logic in the space. Interested in the materiality of the environment from which our cognitive experience originates, Kumža uses different production processes to destroy, remove, or recombine as an opportunity to emerge an alternative.

It often captures and reinforces the feeling of absurdity or strangeness in unstable, illusory and sometimes deceptive moments of everyday life. The main focus is not in people, but in the traces they leave and what meaning it holds.

Works can be seen as the study of causes and effects or different ways in which simple gestures can change the position of an object and have important consequences for that. Kumža uses an arsenal of various instruments to transform deeply resonating carriers of meaning. Using a variety of materials - photographs, glass, epoxy, hair, mirror and colored foil, the artist creates a strange resonance environment, a space of reflection that disrupts the relationship of everyday objects.

This exhibition is reminiscent of the process of photosynthesis, like a greenhouse space. It becomes an ecosystem offering to rethink beliefs or abandon prejudices.

Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela

Lithuanian Photographers Association is financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Exhibition sponsored: by Mondrian Fonds.
Exhibitions partner: The Rooster Gallery.
Graphic design: Laslo Strong.
Acknowledgement: Gabriel Lester.