Photo documentation │ Pam Virada’s exhibition ‘A Trick of Light’

Photo documentation of Pam Virada’s solo exhibition A TRICK OF LIGHT that took place in the exhibition space of Meno avilys Cinemateque (Corner of A. Goštauto and A. Vienuolio Streets, Vilnius) on 13-26 October.

Photos by Alanas Gurinas, Monika Jagusinskytė

A Past That Was Never Owned. A conversation with Thai artist Pam Virada

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

The interplay between the distorted house and the feeling of familiarity is an intricate one. It involves glimpsing fictional places in dreams and encountering what has vanished amidst the darkness. Through conjuring phantasmagoric visions, the installation brings forth light as an immaterial layer to envelope the space, projecting fragments of film negatives from the artist’s 8mm recordings. Within the celluloid, intimate close-ups of forsaken neoclassical mansions scattered across Vilnius lingers, remnants of a bygone era are left in states of abandonment and decay. Like a lifeless entity, within which yet flicker animations of the spirit, the projected images overlap with the exquisite corpse of the abandoned apartment. Architecture thus becomes a haunting ground, reflecting the unsettling nature of societal transition and symbolizing the metamorphoses of societies and geopolitical landscapes.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Pam Virada (b. 1993, Bangkok, Thailand) is an artist living and working in Bangkok and Amsterdam. In her work she navigates the ghostly forces and intimate stories within domestic spheres. Through mixed-media installations and moving images, Virada reconfigures existing contexts and narratives, investigating the themes of impermanence and intimate turmoil in spatial arrangements, objects, text, and expanded cinema. She conducts continuous socio-political and micro-narrative research, investigating various individual and collective memories. Some of her past works have been exhibited / screened at Liste Art Fair Basel, Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (London), Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art (Washington DC), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Singapore International Film Festival, among others.

Pam was a resident at Rupert, where she initially investigated how history informs the contemporary through ‘ghost tours’; a tool for a spectacle that links the urban via the terrifying tales of the city and nation.

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Organisers: Meno avilys and Rupert
Curators: Gerda Paliušytė, Ona Kotryna Dikavičiūtė (Meno avilys)
Exhibition assistant: Povilas Gumbis (Rupert)
Communication: Karolina Augevičiūtė (Rupert), Dovilė Raustytė-Mateikė (Meno avilys)
Graphic Design: Jonė Miškinytė
Translators and editors: Dovydas Laurinaitis, Paulius Balčytis, Ieva Tomaševičiūtė, Alexandra Bondarev
Special thanks to: Ania Tomczyk, Gediminas G. Akstinas

Meno avilys and Rupert’s activities are supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
Made possible with a contribution from the Mondriaan Fund