This documentary photography series by Agota Lukytė can be referred to as cartography of intimacy. By capturing artists’ private workspaces, the author draws invisible maps of their creative work and routine which present fragile exposures of the everyday and sediments of personal interests within them. Here, details of different times, life roles and creative practices rhyme peculiarly: radiator organs and spray paint cans, dill growing on the windowsill and jagged jaws of hung pliers, a calendar scrap from July 16th and the backs of books in a private library... Random compositions of things, tools and artworks turn into unexpected conceptual sculptures that testify to the importance of the creative project.
The author suggests using these simultaneously ephemeral and immovable mundane constellations as subtle coordinates for navigating the artists’ work. Yet these coordinate axes are not strictly symmetrical and do not comply with the entrenched interior photography canon. Impulsive, almost arbitrary, intantaneous shots aim to document sensual references rather than specific space. In this way, each artist studio here becomes similar to Michel Foucault’s heterotopia – a place containing diverse intensities, entanglements of openness and closedness, segments of different time. This property of spaces, spotted by Agota Lukytė, becomes particularly important in relation to the isolation during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In these circumstances, apartments and studios became multifunctional habitats stripped of the distinction between public and private, even if the public was reinforced by other family members, intimate space background, or a cat’s tail on the Zoom screen. Focusing on certain details and foregoing documentary objectivity, the artist makes the subjective lightness of the shot an original methodology that allows exploration of different intimacy registers. Perhaps this can become a means of rethinking the ways of enacting intimacy that can change the forms of the social and the individual in private, public, and hybrid domains?
The American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has said that intimacy builds worlds. If that is true, one must travel them. Agota Lukytė’s photography series unfolds as maps of such narrow and endless worlds; if one follows them, intimate attachments can go beyond the doorsteps of home-studios and shape our gazes and meetings in exhibitions.
Text by Jogintė Bučinskaitė, Art critic
About the author
Agota Lukytė (b. 1988) is a Lithuanian-born artist and photographer. After graduating in Photography and Media arts in Vilnius Academy of Arts, she continued her studies of Visual art in École Nationale Supérieure d’Art Paris-Cergy, where she received her master degree. She is also working as a photo editor and visual consultant in the fields of design and fashion photography.
Her artworks were presented in several group and solo shows in Lithuania, France and US, moreover she was one of the artists selected to be featured in Like There’s No Tomorrow – a comprehensive publication on young Lithuanian photography.
Agota has received a grant to study in an exchange program at École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine-Metz, France in 2011 as well as a grant of the Lithuanian Council of Culture in 2022 for her ongoing series Artist Workplaces.
Her personal work consists of a permanently evolving narratives on the spaces of living, on the relation between nature and culture, and on architecture as camouflage offering a commentary on the contemporary conception of the city and the environment.
Being open to distractions allows her to pay attention to the surrounding world – in her artistic practice Agota acts as a curious observer and collector, using images to organize her thoughts as well as to invent new classifications.
Agota currently lives and works in Como, Italy.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the kind support and help from these people and institutions: Roberto Anzani, Jūratė Gačionytė, Jogintė Bučinskaitė, Paulius Petraitis and Lithuanian Council for Culture. I am very grateful to all the artists who opened the doors of their private spaces and let me take pictures.
In loving memory of my mum Jūratė Lukienė.
Contact:
agotalukyte(at)gmail.com
@agota_lukyte
This project is financed by
Copyright © 2025. Agota Lukytė. All rights reserved. Website design: Jūratė Gačionytė.
This documentary photography series by Agota Lukytė can be referred to as cartography of intimacy. By capturing artists’ private workspaces, the author draws invisible maps of their creative work and routine which present fragile exposures of the everyday and sediments of personal interests within them. Here, details of different times, life roles and creative practices rhyme peculiarly: radiator organs and spray paint cans, dill growing on the windowsill and jagged jaws of hung pliers, a calendar scrap from July 16th and the backs of books in a private library... Random compositions of things, tools and artworks turn into unexpected conceptual sculptures that testify to the importance of the creative project.
The author suggests using these simultaneously ephemeral and immovable mundane constellations as subtle coordinates for navigating the artists’ work. Yet these coordinate axes are not strictly symmetrical and do not comply with the entrenched interior photography canon. Impulsive, almost arbitrary, intantaneous shots aim to document sensual references rather than specific space. In this way, each artist studio here becomes similar to Michel Foucault’s heterotopia – a place containing diverse intensities, entanglements of openness and closedness, segments of different time. This property of spaces, spotted by Agota Lukytė, becomes particularly important in relation to the isolation during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In these circumstances, apartments and studios became multifunctional habitats stripped of the distinction between public and private, even if the public was reinforced by other family members, intimate space background, or a cat’s tail on the Zoom screen. Focusing on certain details and foregoing documentary objectivity, the artist makes the subjective lightness of the shot an original methodology that allows exploration of different intimacy registers. Perhaps this can become a means of rethinking the ways of enacting intimacy that can change the forms of the social and the individual in private, public, and hybrid domains?
The American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has said that intimacy builds worlds. If that is true, one must travel them. Agota Lukytė’s photography series unfolds as maps of such narrow and endless worlds; if one follows them, intimate attachments can go beyond the doorsteps of home-studios and shape our gazes and meetings in exhibitions.
Text by Jogintė Bučinskaitė, Art critic
About the author
Agota Lukytė (b. 1988) is a Lithuanian-born artist and photographer. After graduating in Photography and Media arts in Vilnius Academy of Arts, she continued her studies of Visual art in École Nationale Supérieure d’Art Paris-Cergy, where she received her master degree. She is also working as a photo editor and visual consultant in the fields of design and fashion photography.
Her artworks were presented in several group and solo shows in Lithuania, France and US, moreover she was one of the artists selected to be featured in Like There’s No Tomorrow – a comprehensive publication on young Lithuanian photography.
Agota has received a grant to study in an exchange program at École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine-Metz, France in 2011 as well as a grant of the Lithuanian Council of Culture in 2022 for her ongoing series Artist Workplaces.
Her personal work consists of a permanently evolving narratives on the spaces of living, on the relation between nature and culture, and on architecture as camouflage offering a commentary on the contemporary conception of the city and the environment.
Being open to distractions allows her to pay attention to the surrounding world – in her artistic practice Agota acts as a curious observer and collector, using images to organize her thoughts as well as to invent new classifications.
Agota currently lives and works in Como, Italy.
Acknowledgments
This project would not have been possible without the kind support and help from these people and institutions: Roberto Anzani, Jūratė Gačionytė, Jogintė Bučinskaitė, Paulius Petraitis and Lithuanian Council for Culture. I am very grateful to all the artists who opened the doors of their private spaces and let me take pictures.
In loving memory of my mum Jūratė Lukienė.
Contact:
agotalukyte(at)gmail.com
@agota_lukyte
This project is financed by
Copyright © 2025. Agota Lukytė. All rights reserved. Website design: Jūratė Gačionytė.