14/06/2010






Rimaldas Viksraitis

In 2009 Viksraitis won the prestigious Discovery Award at the Arles photography festival, having been nominated by Martin Parr, who described the work as "slightly insane and wonderfully surreal".
That about captures it. The motifs that recur in Viksraitis's work are, in no particular order, chickens, vodka, breasts, dirt, animal carcasses and inebriated, often semi-naked, pensioners. In terms of photographic reference points, Boris Mikhailov's work springs to mind, though his images of a bleak post-Soviet netherworld of alcoholism and madness are altogether harsher and more detached.