To coincide with Lithuania taking up the Presidency of the European Union, Ffotogallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of recent work by the London-based artist Indre Serpytyte.

Indre Serpytyte’s work explores history, individual and collective memory and loss, relating to her family history and that of Lithuania, her native country, immediately prior to its independence from Soviet occupation.

The artist’s recent series 1944 – 1991 examines anti-Soviet resistance in Lithuania, the so-called ‘war after the war’. Through her images Serpytyte invokes the memory of these events by visiting actual sites, including photographing the forests of the so called ‘forest brothers‘ and former houses of NKVD-NKGB-MVD-MGB Soviet forces. These documented sites are then transformed into beautiful photographic images that are inscribed with loss. In her photographs the houses become dead houses, completely sealed, that contain the memories inside them whilst the forests stand in for absent memory; they are placeless and disclose nothing.

Prior to 1944 -1991 Serpytyte created a series of striking still-life images of what appear to be the remnants of a bureaucratic system. In the series A State of Silence Serpytyte questions official accounts of the untimely death of her father, a government official, in an apparent car accident. This series won her the prestigious Jerwood Prize for photography in 2006.