Vytautas Kumža

VYTAUTAS KUMŽA (* 1992, Lithuania) visual artist based in Amsterdam.

My work exists in a universe governed by an ambiguous, fantastical logic that elevates the banality from everyday life into an oddity. The content of my work holds an obsessive looking for meaning: staging conversations between objects that remain mute, anticipating a space where things activate each other through performativity, between the realms of the animated and the lifeless. While my work positions itself primarily under photography, its content is often constructed as a sculptural installation that either doubles or antagonizes the spatial presentation of the images. I create an embodied experience for the audience using sculptural elements and presentation displays. The installations become an unfaithful encyclopedic archive where the displayed elements leave visible marks to photographs, showing sources of inspiration as well as the processes for their production.

I construct situations that problematize the limitations of photography as a medium by making visible the artificial nature of staging. My installations operate as a vocabulary constructed by artists’ trickery —visual illusions, spatial constructs, inverted colors, and exaggerated scales. These are techniques that allow a reappraisal of mundane and familiar objects. I arrange the images to highlight similarities between genres and point out to structural parallels between the outside and the inside, organic and inanimate, natural and artificial. The imagery includes interruptions in landscapes, logic, ironic reversals of what is unexpected, illusion and magic, and ironic commentaries on photography and art. It also shows my desire to remind the audience that we are looking at a photograph, not the thing being photographed.

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