Our gallery is going to take part at Art Dubai international art fair for a 7th time. This year with solo exposition by Vytautas Kumza (Booth number D7).

As one of the world’s most international art fairs, Art Dubai has further expanded its commitment to cultivating a culture of discovery, offering exciting new global perspectives and broadening conversations about art beyond traditional western-led geographical scopes and narratives. The fair drives meaningful engagement with the rich cultural heritage and contemporary art practices of the region and extending to territories across Southeast and Central Asia, the African continent, and Latin America through presentations across its gallery sections.

The exposition addresses the state between fiction and reality; a vision, a problem, a dream, a nightmare, a hangover, or a miracle. The liminal space between the lost past and the unknown future. Something that is forgotten but, all of the sudden, becomes remembered. In this exhibition, Vytautas Kumža shows a series of new twisted photographic works that are combined with sculptural objects and spatial installations, evoking a feeling of anxiety and pointing out to a widespread sense of fragility. It affects our senses and understandings in new and slippery ways.

Kumža immerses us within visual contexts and ungraspable situations where the viewer observes familiar objects and reflects on them by assigning new functionalities and possibilities. These objects are mundane and go through a radical transformative process. They end up combined with other materials and objects which generate new meanings and stories. Kumža is interested in how we perceive gestures and symbols through emotions that we attach to the surrounding objects. 

VYTAUTAS KUMŽA (b. 1992) graduated from the photography studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Netherlands) in 2017. He has participated in group exhibitions in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece, Czech Republic, Switzerland, South Korea, and has held several solo shows in Lithuania and the Netherlands. His works have been presented in international art fairs Art Dubai, Unseen, Unfair, Art Rotterdam, Enter, Foto Tallinn and photography festivals. He is the winner of NN Art Award (2022), Sunly prize (2021), Sybren Hellinga Art Prize (2019), Ron Mandos Young Blood Talent Award (2017), and a nominee of numerous photography awards. In 2019 Kumža was awarded a Mondriaan Fund grant for emerging artists. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam.

The Project is kindly supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality and Mondriaan Fonds.