The Forms of Things, The Forms of Skulls, Forms of Love

Lithuanian photographs from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Centre Pompidou and the Lithuanian Photographers Association

1973: The Iron Curtain divides Europe, isolating a large number of countries then subject to the hegemony of the USSR – including Lithuania – from the so-called Western World. In that year, the first in a series of donations was made, which – in spite of the strictly controlled borders – were to enhance the holdings of the French Bibliothèque nationale (today called the BnF) and ultimately constitute a significant collection: approximately 1 600 prints of 22 Lithuanian photographers, dating for the most part from the 1960s and 1970s and representative of the Lithuanian school of photography, promoted by the very active Lithuanian Society of Art Photography.

2023: Fifty years later, the Centre Pompidou’s Photography Department has launched an acquisition project for Lithuanian photography, building on the kernel of the BnF collection and taking advantage of the dynamic of preparations for the Season of Lithuania in France. The works selected are this time being taken from a generation of photographers principally active from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. These artists introduce a new and more radical visual language, which bears witness to a form of social and artistic rebellion prefiguring the end of the Soviet era.

The exhibition which the present publication is meant to accompany draws upon these two institutional collections and presents a major chapter in European photography to the public of Paris Photo. The exhibition is complemented by prints from the collection of the Lithuanian Photographers Association, whose mission carries forward in some ways that of the Lithuanian Society of Art Photography, as well as by a few contemporary propositions. Its title – borrowed from the poet Mantas Balakauskas, born in 1989 – stands for a multifaceted photographic art, anchored in age-old human experience as well as everyday life, whose most recent manifestations often invoke the collective memory.

Exhibition produced in partnership with the Kaunas Photography Gallery, in the framework of the Season of Lithuania in France 2024.