2C Public Exhibition in Vilnius city centre
2C photography exhibition “On Goodness” transforms Vilnius into an open-air gallery
The second wave of COVID has stopped the cultural life and locked most Lithuanians inside. Yet 2nd Chance project and its coordinating organisation, Integration Center, have found a way to bring the art back to people’s lives amid pandemic by transforming one of the main Vilnius street’s into an open-air gallery. As people in Lithuania are asked to leave the home only when necessary, the organizers made it possible to visit the exhibition online too – from the safe space of their home.
Open-air photography exhibition “On Goodness” features moments from prisons and communities (visited during 2nd Chance training courses) in Peru and South Africa in 2019. The artworks invite the viewer on a trip to a far-away land – a separated and isolated territory of a prison. In times, when our capacity to understand isolation is greater than ever, the exhibition calls for compassion and empathy for those locked away.
Dainius Ščiuka, photographer and participant of 2nd Chance training courses, says that “On Goodness” is a significant exhibition for him personally, as it pushed the author to think about the concept of freedom in ways he never had before. “The training courses in South Africa and Peru allowed me to open unexplored worlds such as slums where crime fosters and high-security prisons. One prisoner shared that he found freedom in making peace with isolation. Interestingly, once back home, I had to do the same – build my own relationship with the quarantine measures and a changing world.”
Inspired by the training courses and matured during the Spring lockdown in 2020, the exhibition “On Goodness” plays with the opposites and invites the viewer to look for the thread connecting the two: to search for freedom in isolation and better understand those, whose world we know nothing about.
