Gerda Paliušytė ‘Expectations’
Expectations is the latest chapter in Gerda Paliušytė’s ongoing project Guys and Blue Flowers, which has evolved over several years. The project comprises two photographic series – Guys (since 2021) and Blue Flowers (since 2022) – always shown together and exploring standardised systems and various forms of intimacy.
At the centre of this exhibition is a series of macro photographs of white orchid blossoms. They grew after the injection-dyed blue petals – a short-lived marketing trick used by the floral industry to entice buyers – had withered and fallen away. Large-format giclée ink prints allow for a closer look at the usually invisible textures and tonal subtleties of the white blossoms, revealing nature’s quiet resistance to colour manipulation. Almost indistinguishable from the surrounding exhibition space in daylight, these images, through their contours, invite projections of other bodies and spaces, highlighting the contingency of images and the narratives we construct from them. Did what we see really happen? Did this image ever truly exist?
This sense of contingency is echoed in another element of the exhibition: a sculptural object – a box – by Gediminas G. Akstinas. Through an artistic gesture, two distinct transport packages – two bodies – are merged into a single artwork, We, that temporarily suspends the original function of these mass-produced items. In the exhibition, the box becomes an autonomous space, displaying images suggested for visitors to take away. Among them is a photograph from Guys, as well as images reminiscent of gas station interiors and exteriors – abstracted shapes visually resonating with the macro images of flowers. Like the box, they depict ruptured realities: drawn from real-world elements, yet unresolved, mutable, and suggestive of replicated spaces of commercial exchange.
All the elements of the exhibition – macro images of flowers, a transportation box, assumed spaces – embody a suspension of movement. Within a world defined by relentless circulation and saturated with expectation, this pause becomes a gesture that disrupts inertia. The enlarged blossoms and the model-like box – a microcosm containing other images – twist space and time into a loop between interior and exterior, decay and becoming. In a reality exhausted by endless cycles of production and anxiety, a rupture emerges – a fleeting present that opens the possibility of imagination.
GERDA PALIUŠYTĖ (b. 1987) is an artist based in Vilnius. She is interested in various documentary practices, historical and popular culture phenomena and characters, and their relationship to social reality. Her films, photographs, and installations often explore different forms of intimacy and collective existence. Among her photography projects are the series For Cecil (2018–2020) and Guys and Blue Flowers (since 2021), both published as artist books. In 2025, her new film The Ship, dedicated to Lithuanian choreographer and dancer Algirdas Stravinskas, will be released.
Gerda Paliušytė’s most recent solo exhibitions include shows at Jeu de Paume – Tours and Editorial in Vilnius. In 2020, she was awarded the Rupert x Lithuanian Culture Institute x Somerset House Studios residency.
