Interview by Giulia Del Gobbo
All Images © Vytautas Kumža
Vytautas Kumža (1992) is a Lithuanian visual artist based in Amsterdam. In 2017 he graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam in Photography. His work has been recently exhibited in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Museum of Photography Seoul, CODA Museum, Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam and Rooster Gallery, Lithuania. His work is included in collections at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Netherlands, MO Museum, Vilnius and CODA Museum, Netherlands. In 2022, Kumža won the NN Art Award and in 2019, the Sybren Hellinga Art Prize.
Vytautas Kumža breaks mundane objects, builds, de-constructs, constructs, merges them with different materials in order to open up for new meanings, interpretations, emotions. He tries to remind the viewer that it is not only about looking at a photograph but rather at a sort of material composition. Indeed, Vytautas Kumža works with images that cannot live by themselves, without something that is attached to them. The physicality that one needs to walk around his pictures and his idea of a hidden storyline within objects and pictures, remains for him an anchor to ground his practice. Coming from a photography background, while experimenting and shifting to a photo-sculptural type of work, Vytautas Kumža often inquires what photography is today and how to challenge its borders.
Giulia Del Gobbo (GDG): Hello Vytautas, thank you for hosting me in such an intimate and multifunctional space! It feels good to be here in your studio, surrounded by all your inspiring working tools that I can already get a feeling of what interests you. Can you introduce us to your practice?
Vytautas Kumža (VK): Hello Giulia, thank you for reaching out and coming here! As you can see, I work with photography in an almost sculptural way, looking into the psychological manner in which we read images and symbols. I collect different situations and objects for my picture settings – mainly coming from a warehouse close to my place – which I turn into dysfunctional ones, contemplating how an everyday item and an image would stage a dialogue together. In my photos, I mostly play with material and psychological contrast to let this object-image tension be palpable, putting together soft/hard elements which help interpret the work or create associations. It is very concrete in Can’t reach you (Archival ink-jet print, radio antenna, aluminium frame. 100 x 80 cm, 2024) where there is an ear, pencils coming which look like sound waves, and then a kind of antenna that transforms into a tool to grasp or to listen. Or in Beginning or the end (Archival ink-jet print, metal hardware, knife, aluminium frame. 100 x 80 cm, 2024) with the apple, which is not correctly placed, sort of sliced, and a knife which looks already after the action, disabled with holes and screwed in.
In my point of view, it is not about necessarily telling something directly with a photograph, but rather provoking and triggering a reaction from the viewer. My work, indeed, is also about the seduction of the observer: when you put an object on top of a picture, your eyes do not look into the image anymore. First, I persuade with beautiful photos and then –only later by spending time looking at the works– I make space for noticing the hand-errors in such glossy photographs. I just think we are so bored of the perfect quality of the images.
(GDG): When thinking of which adjective in the title of this interview would at its best give justice to your work, immediately “handcrafted” came to my mind. How does the making process of your images unfold?
(VK): Everything happens within these walls, as you can spot a corner of my studio in Take it or leave it (Archival ink-jet print, metal hardware, aluminium frame. 80X60cm, 2024). The point is that, with photography, normally you do not see so much the maker, and suddenly it becomes only about the second of making a photo and sending it to print it. With my work, I decide to go through all the steps by myself in my studio so that I have space to intervene in the process, whether by forging glass – like in Marlboro Man (Archival ink-jet print, fused glass, screw, cigarette, aluminum frame. 80X60cm, 2023) – or modelling the frame – like in Morning (Ink-jet print, epoxy, brooch, metal bracelet. 30x26cm, 2023) – or printing myself by testing the quality of the images.
Most of my photos are produced with a tiny camera and I do not apply any post-production to them but rather a total hand-construction. Lately, I have been moving from flash light to daylight, so that the latest works are not using studio lights but only the natural-window light of the studio, which helps me to create a contrast between something uncanny yet real. Indeed, for me it is really about using light as a sculpting tool. I mastered its use by working as a photography studio assistant, and by studying Conceptual Photography at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and then Studio Practice in Lithuania, both which give me such a balance between a technical and conceptual approach to photography.
One may say that my photographs look almost digitally rendered exactly for this specific use of the light. I guess it serves as a reminder of how much we trust the images and how much we are used to their altered version that we do not even question any more that somebody would spend time composing them, measuring time and effort.
(GDG): Due to the conceptual layering of your images and the material hands-on interventions on your pictures, your work can be perceived at the intersection of installation, sculpture and photography. How do you see the role of the camera in this interchange and how do you deal with traditional photography rules?
(VK): To me the camera is there only to document, it is a tool. Creating a scene and deciding to take a picture is the only part of photography in my practice, since a photographer’s definition is getting broader and broader and simply coming back to anyone working with imagery. In my opinion, there are so many theoretical structures in photography that are limiting it to its full potential. Most of the time we do not notice that museum glass is present in frames, so I thought, why not working with it together with the photograph? For such a long time photography was presented in a wooden frame or in a museum display and I am wondering, why are we not challenging it?
There is so much production of image-making nowadays, but that is where it stays. Instead, I am interested in exploring how far such subjective images can go, almost every time questioning what photography is to me, ending up with the idea that through my handwork I can create a fictional reality space where leaving errors on purpose to track back the image process and production.
When working, indeed, I feel almost like a painter. There is a kind of craftsmanship in my photos which allows space to see the imperfections in the production that charge the work with some quality and to generate tension between conserving an image and trying to alter it.
(GDG): Your pictures are so tangible that, when it comes to curate all of them together in an exhibition context, you really need to think of a peculiar disposition for them. Was there an occasion where your works were opening up a dialogue with the space?
(VK): I am thinking of that time when I was invited to work on the archive of the CODA Museum in Apeldoorn. I needed an architectural structure to support my images, and I thought of using glass, both to highlight my work with this material and to emphasize the architecture itself. CODA Museum houses a contemporary art collection, but it is also unique in preserving a body of private objects donated by people from the local community. I decided to engrave parts of these objects onto glass, manipulating them to overlay my own images, as a way of using someone else’s archive as a vessel to reveal my own.
The idea was to hold the works and convey a sense of fragility as if they were floating in space, and to achieve this, I removed the ceiling and replaced it with my archive of objects, resembling trash, pipes, and fragments from the top – creating a layered, suspended environment.
For every exhibition, there is always a structure or logic that I curate carefully, introducing some new pieces and crafting a loose narrative that runs through the works. In general, I do not apply the traditional way of producing series, but rather prefer proceeding with thematic associations, always making sure – amid all the sculptural elements – to include a human presence that can compensate for the otherwise lifeless images.
(GDG): Here on the table is your book Hollow published by Free Pony Press. Going through the pages, what is intriguing to me is the translation act of your imagery on a 2D paper scale while, at the same time, keeping its tridimensional feeling.
(VK): Exactly. I wanted to create a kind of gesture, especially with the first image that appears after the hole which is a sculptural act of damaging, screwing through surfaces, combined with a sense of experimental fiction. It is quite unusual to have a monograph at such an early stage in a career, but the short texts by Elaine ML Tam help to offer a different way of looking at the images. Some of the stories behind the works are real, but in the context of the book, it becomes difficult to distinguish which ones are true.
Indeed, in Hollow I wanted to keep the images-objects materiality alive. I have been noticing that viewers often have a strong tactile desire to physically interact with my work, just recalling someone pulling a thread from the coat, or someone else remaining handcuffed to the frame. I am somehow also interested in these moments of tension, where I can see how people react to my work and build from there. I dedicate very much time to the choice of the different objects needed to activate the images, keeping on experimenting with them and then suddenly, there is the one that works: often, it is an unconscious decision, a connection that feels right and completes the picture somehow.
In general, it is a real challenge to reproduce my images and retain that three-dimensional impact for the viewer. Again, I guess it is about trust: when you see them in the book, are you looking at a render, a photo of an object, or something in between?
(GDG): Imagination, irony and playfulness are clearly strong presences in your practice. Will you still keep them in your future works?
(VK): Sure! Very soon, I will be starting a new book project –a different kind of approach this time, as I will be collaborating with students of a German gymnasium– but yet conceived as a dialogue between an adult and a child, between imagination and interpretation, allowing a playful and open-ended approach to photography.
I envision this book as a tool for exploring different ways of seeing, filled with drawings and sketches designed to stimulate ideas and imagination. The initial idea is that of sharing some of my own works with the students, using them as catalysts or triggers for their own drawings. Later, bringing these drawings back to my studio, where they will serve as a kind of brief. From there, translating their sketches into still life compositions. Together with the students, we will build abstract tools and new possibilities for creating images, investigating different ways of generating and extracting images, but also thinking about how to engage the book’s viewers, inviting them to take part in the process through their own assignments.
I often make myself quick scribbles to figure out what I want to do, so in a way, this project is about finding a method to translate those instinctive gestures and searching for new ways of thinking about my creative process.
