Alnis Stakle

Mellow Apocalypse

The world of images becomes ever more saturated, and our capacity to grasp and comprehend it is becoming more and more limited. Poetically speaking, the map has grown larger than the territory. I am interested in the fate of the canonized artistic, scientific and journalistic images and their potential to embody contemporary meanings. The institutions that select, store and deliberately make collections of images in art, science and journalism have acquired the status of authority in culture. The collections of these institutions are a priori considered the “golden legacy” of visual culture that ought to be preserved for the future. In my collages, I have used images from open source collections of art museums, scientific institutions and various image banks whose archives may be considered iconic testimonies of the present and the past. The collages are grounded in my search for syntactic visual language connections in the images pertaining to various periods, media and domains of the visual culture. The collages make use of the ideas and technical codes established in the visual communication that transcend the borderlines of ages, media and cultures. The codes that are so deeply engrained in culture that they are used without thinking and are understood through preexisting schemas in the recipients’ minds. Although the decoding of images depends on the recipients’ interests, values, convictions and wishes, yet the globalized world of the visual culture is oversaturated with simulacra where the feminine and the masculine, the other, the desirable, the repulsive and the beautiful is depicted through the use of similar ideas and technical codes in different epochs and various media. These syntactic connections across various periods of visual culture and different media are traceable in persons’ postures and gestures, in colour scenography and similar depiction of objects and architecture. The technical execution of the collages is based in the image post-processing software algorithms, letting them overtake the accuracy and precision of image depiction. Thus, the digital post-processing technological features become a part of the collages’ notional and technical code.

Alnis Stakle 2019 – 2021

Alnis Stakle

Alnis Stakle (1975, Latvia) is a Latvian photographer and a Professor of photography at the Rigas Stradins University (LV). He holds PhD in art education from Daugavpils University (LV). His work brings a critical approach to questions of visual representation of collective and private trauma, loss, memories, and the materiality of the medium of photography. Working both documentary and conceptually his works disclose how sociopolitical ideas can be examined through both fact and fiction as well as the interplay of collective and subjective experience.

Curator of the exhibition

Grzegorz Jarmocewicz

Exhibition Availability

Ludwik Zamenhof Centre; 19 Warszawska Street; 27.09-20.10.2024; Tues.-Monday, 10:00-17:00