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You Can Call Him Another Man
Maria Kapajeva

You Can Call Him Another Man
Maria Kapajeva
The Kaunas Photography Gallery
English

 

Text by Italo Calvino, from the novel If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller

 

Softcover
118 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.

 

About the Artist
Maria Kapajeva is an Estonian artist who is based in London. Her work has been shown internationally including the most recent shows & screenings in Romania, Germany, Colombia and France. At the moment she works on a publication of her first photo book “You can call him another man” and on her solo exhibition in Estonia (September 2017). Maria is a Fellow of HEA, teaches at UCA (Farnham). Maria is a co-organiser of Fast Forward: Women in Photography and works as the Network Facilitator for The Fast Forward 2 project, supported by The Leverhulme Trust. Kapajeva’s photographic work has developed at an exciting pace from its collaborative beginnings using various means such as installation, quilts, digital collage, portraiture in which to consider women’s identity, challenging tradition and old values in today’s globalised economy.

 

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.

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