Alnis Stakle

Alnis Stakle follow Latvian, born 1975

Lives in Riga, Latvia

Projects/Portfolios

Shangri-La

Introduction

Aura Project

Introduction

Aura Project

The genuine aura appears in all things, not just specific ones as people imagine / Walter Benjamin - On Hashish, Protocol V

Philosophers’ propensity to discuss the semantics and value of original and its copy as well as the intricate interconnections between the two can be traced back to Plato. The discussion is still ongoing. Works in this series were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “Protocols of Drug Experiments”, Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”, Boris Groys’s “Art Power” and Nicholas Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics”.

Since the dawn of the 20th century, works of art have often been described by referring to aura to put into words the intangible, phenomenological substance that surrounds an object of perception and epitomises its authenticity. Certainly, aura is not an essential component of a work of art and/or depicted object. Rather, it relates to the medium of perception and is grounded in particular structures of visual perception. The essence of aura is encoded in the distance between a work of art and its viewer – a distance that never fully disappears but can be closed with a look. Metaphorically, a work of art and its aura are never amenable to physical touch. Yet they are accessible with a look, which should be interpreted not only as a sensory reaction to a visual stimulus but rather as an instinctive affective response more in the domain of unconscious mental structures.

This series originates in different art museums where photographs were taken of seminal works by such iconic artists as Jannis Kounellis, Dan Flavin, Man Ray, Yves Klein, Hermann Nitsch, Wolfgang Tillmans, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Santiago Sierra, Francis Bacon, Charles Long, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Anish Kapoor, etc. Pieces for the series were selected through instinctive reaction to photographed artwork. The photographic medium was used with a utopian hope to capture and obtain an imprint of artwork’s aura in photographs. My personal and conceptual concern was not just taking photographs of seminal works of art but rather photographing them with a long exposure technique, without a tripod – a method that imprints on a negative my principal bodily rhythms, such as breathing and heartbeat.

To paraphrase Boris Groys, who describes the varied inspirations and methods of contemporary works of art by claiming that a piece can be created not only as copy from original but also as original from copy, I would interpret the creation of works in the Aura Project series as emergence of original from original.

All works are archival pigment ink prints on rag paper 130cm x 130cm (ed 3) & 100cm x 100cm (ed 5)

Ongoing 2011 -

Ilgas

Introduction

Ilgas

“Ilgas” means longing in Latvian. Yet, within this series of photos Ilgas is also a place name and the name of a manor house.

Ilgas manor house was built in the 1890s in the style of baroque. The architectural design of the edifice stirs associations with Italian palazzo-type buildings, which is why the manor house is said to have been once called Palazzo Ilga. Currently the building holds the study basis of Daugavpils University (Latvia). Ilgas manor house is located only a few kilometres off the Belarusian border, which is simultaneously the eastern border of the European Union.

I first visited Ilgas manor house in 2010. At that time, 45 female students temporarily lived there – they did nature research on the territory of a protected natural area. At that time, the building has no plumbing, which means that such facilities as lavatory or a warm shower are not available. These conditions make the students’ domestic conditions resemble those of extreme survival reality shows.

When I began shooting, I realized that the documentary narrative about female students and/or place would be too simple and traditional, based on the exotization and search for something other and unlike, which is so characteristic of documentary photography. I was most surprised by the merging of the interior of the old manor house and the young women in one physical space. Traditionally, photographs relate the body of a young female with sexuality and lust. Squalor, on the other hand, is bound with the interior of deserted and/or old buildings and stirs associations with the historically unknown, the menacing and the hidden in the origins of interior. In photography and films, similar combinations of the female body and old interior are exploited to create narrations where the combination of lust, sexuality and environment’s apparent menace is used as an instrument to draw viewers’ attention.

In several years time, Ilgas manor house was restored, and now it is a modern research centre. I returned to finish my story, which, effectively, is not based in any certain narrative. Rather it permits the audience to construct from their memories and imagination a subjective narrative, as well as themselves draw the boundaries between the documentary and the fictional therein.

Historically, photography has always been related to memories, reminiscence and the sentimental. Thus, photography functions as a catalyst for longing that challenges our imagination to constructed interwoven and immediate time and space relationships between here and there, now and then. My works from the series Ilgas, similarly as the restoration of Ilgas manor house, construct a seemingly unnatural relationship between the past and the present at some Latvian backwater.

If asked to classify these works, I would say they are peculiar still lives that portend the surreal and the inexplicable in the mundane, in self-representation and in construction of own living space.

Works created 2010 - 2015