Throughout our lives, the sites of some of our most transcendent experiences ranges beyond purpose-defined spaces, the ones we've named basements, kitchens, studios, gardens, and streets. Even the most unnameable, abstract emotion is anchored somewhere (nameless too), often situated in a porous place between and outside the constructed theatres of daily life, behind the scenes, while nobody's looking. Tuning in to the concept of liminality and its mysterious necessity could be a clue to the endless and apparently pointless hallways, waiting rooms and vacated warehouses filling in the space we've otherwise framed with words. The chiaroscuro photographs of Monika Bielskyte, a young Lithuanian artist and writer based in Paris, shed some light on the evanescent nature of emotional space-making. In series which appear to portray, among various otherworldly situations, dances, communal rituals, the fall of an angel, the meaning of abuse, and the confusion of bodily image with personal identity, Bielskyte's take on humanity and its surroundings is immediately gripping yet dense with possible interpretation, a vision of souls made flesh and lost in medias res - bodies resting in non-descript, timeless space.
Upon first look I found myself trying to grasp what it was that each fragment was exactly documenting, until I realised the magic behind the pictures is less the action than Bielskyte's concern with its subsequent reverberation, the action´s effacement, the vestiges at the margins. Echoing some of the spiritual instrospection in Francesca Woodman´s test prints and the rich symbology latent in Tarkovsky's films, as well as the overexposed corporeality of Warhol´s reels, these slices of Bielskyte's stories are as mysterious as her method, a reflection of everyday miracles rarely captured from such an original and personally invested sideways stance.
To see more of Bielskyte's work in Your Gallery click here.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez is a writer/editor based in London and Madrid. She also makes art and is one half of Pipas, a pop duo.
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