KAUNAS PHOTO STAR 2020 - Open Call

KAUNAS PHOTO is the longest-running annual photographic festival in the Baltic States, based in Kaunas, Lithuania, since 2004. Maintaining its strong international character, KAUNAS PHOTO is a platform of premieres of emerging talents. “Photo World” (China) titled KAUNAS PHOTO as a festival on crossroads of European photography. The current objective is to become a friendly festival to its audience as well as to the participating artists.

In collaboration with LensCulture, KAUNAS PHOTO festival announces an Open Call for its 17th edition, inviting photographers to propose their works and offering exhibiting opportunities as well as participation at New KAUNAS PHOTO STAR Award, consisting of a solo exhibition at the largest photography gallery in the Baltic States, Kaunas Photography Gallery and a 2500 EUR monetary prize. Open Call provides opportunities to be selected to the festival exhibition and projection program. All exhibiting artists, selected via KAUNAS PHOTO STAR Open Call will be offered artist fees.

KAUNAS PHOTO festival opening events will start on September 3, 2020 with KAUNAS PHOTO STAR Exhibition. Festival’s events and outdoor exhibitions will run until the end of October.

Topic of the year: Peripheral Visions.

In 2020, KAUNAS PHOTO festival was planned to celebrate the periphery, the province, the outback, l’arrière-pays, the background of metropolis in a state of uncertainty, balancing between possibilities and neglect, prospering vistas for transiting commuters and struggling agriculture, remnants of local identities and the global odor spread by passing-by intercontinental flights.

Ever since image-making became possible, photographers were those who would disclose new territories and bring back images to the „civilised world“. In the 21st century, spaces, places, areas outside the big cities, countries of power, once unknown, now become either simply forgotten or are targets for visual investigation inspired by transformations.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the fight against it imposed new rules and conceptions of space for living or/and work, perceptions of spacious places we’d rather go, if we could leave the city, imposed limits and borders which were absent for decades. Unable to leave home, leave our own community limits, travel abroad, we are are internet users who are allowed to or would only agree to travel a small distance, remaining within our home country, rediscovering the niche pecularities or contemplating places that „normally“ would be unimportant, uninteresting simply because they’re just around the corner, and not in a reach of a long-haul flight.

KAUNAS PHOTO festival’s topic aims to look at what is on the margin, just across the window or the border that we can or cannot cross, to discover the spaces, places, lands, areas that usually were in the periphery of the vision. The thematic scope includes self-isolation and things it changed in our habits, attitudes, undermined topics around obvious things, trends beyond mainstream. The festival invites to rethink what in 2020 became important, what was less so, what was taken for granted or simply undermined until now. Both documentary and constructed, geography – based and idea-driven works, works produced during pandemic and in the recent years are welcome.

Let us rethink what in 2020 became important, what was less so, taken for granted or simply undermined until now.