Arturas Valiauga

The Baltic Sea used to be the end of the world, literally, a space signifying the beyond and sealing us off the “capitalist paradise” properly and definitely. Now the sea has changed. It is no longer a vast emptiness spawning dreams of the unknown, butjust a huge bowl of water alive with fishing boats, ferries, and ships transporting goods and people in all directions. The Baltic Sea now has two shores and neither of them keeps the promise of a better life to a traveler. The other shore must be very much like this one: jangling metal, fishy smells, ghastly polluted water, and busy people who rarely cast a glance at the sea.

At least, this is what Lithuanian photographer Arturas Valiauga discovered when he set off to explore life on the sea. Yes, the sea is now a “medium” of communication, but an odd one. When anybody can simply fly over it in less than an hour, some people choose to spend around 17 hours stuck in ferries, killing time in bars. This is where the photographer captures them: waiting for the other shore. Their occupations are indicated: a builder, a dockworker, a fisherman. Yet their faces tell nothing—they have no history, no loved ones, no homes, no space filled with their selves; they all have uniformly straightened up for a photograph in anticipation. Anticipation of what? Perhaps of a break from the boredom caused by the awareness that there is no unknown at the end of their monotonous journey. The photographer has added images of the shores they have left and those they are heading to, which look exactly the same: unremarkable and unexciting. As if telling us in advance that the long travel over the sea will have not changed anything, will never have happened, all those hours will not have been. The ferry is a slice of space not recorded in the memory of time.

This is quite different from what Arturas Valiauga usually likes to photograph (I Dropped in on Stepas House, We Talked about Life; Still Identity). He discovers spaces in which people’s personalities and histories are embedded. They are written not only in things as signs, but also in the shadows of space, in its square stability (Valiauga’s preferred format) and in its painterly ambience ready to last for centuries. Arturas seems to linger in such spaces. He records every movement, disclosing the being in the space. He walks around, turns, slightly changes the angle, shifts the focus, comes closer, and goes away, as if stuck in a place cut off from everywhere and nowhere, a space where time has slowed down. It is strange that Valiauga’s photographs—filled with signs of social links between people, of constant communication between the shores—create a profound sense of being out of the present global time. As with his most recent project about the sea, developed for the Ars Baltica Triennial, they are not so much about what the photographer has set out to discover—the social fabric of personal experience—but about existence attached to different material manifestations. Being between two shores for a long time brings the builder, the dockworker, the lady, and the trucker to the zero point of existence—meet them before they get back to their routines and histories. Meet them in time that has not been.

Agnė Narušytė