Making an exhibition of myself

Not in the mood for sneaking around taking photographs of unsuspecting characters today I thought I’d go an have a look at the prospective gallery spaces in the two shopping centres that appeal to me the most. First was Europa (www.europa.lt), which having looked at it in a new light (no pun intended) is by far the best shopping centre in Vilnius. Banana-shaped and on three floors, it’s mostly fashion outlets plus a few restaurants and cafés and it’s in the new swanky business district. Best of all it’s got a glass roof, and the light during the day is perfect. I’d been told yesterday that there was a space inside for exhibitions, but this wasn’t exactly true. There were six appalling photographs hanging on bits of string and in crappy frames, but they were just against a wall on the top floor. What was interesting was that a lot of people were looking at them. If I decide to pursue exhibiting here I’ll need to design the whole thing (or rather I’ll need to get somebody to design it for me). The two spaces I like are the bridge on the top floor that joins the two rows of shops on either side and one of the two hanging pods that belong to a café. Next up was Akropolis (www.akropolis.lt), the most popular of all the shopping centres in the city and always packed. The exhibition space here I already knew about, and it runs down a corridor where the toilets are. It’s dark and depressing and nobody was looking at the (dreadful) photography on display. So, Europa it almost certainly is… unless things happen at the Prospekto Gallery or I decide to exhibit in the café-bar I mentioned before (or at least I think I mentioned before). In Akropolis I also couldn’t resist buying a camcorder, the cheapest one they had, which is an old MiniDV camera that I bought because of another project I’m working on here (www.freevilnius.com) and also because the 20 hours or so of footage I shot in Cuba a decade ago is all on MiniDV and I want to digitise it all before the tapes degrade too much. As for the actual content of the photographic exhibition, I’m almost certain now that it’s going to be a black and white Nokia retrospective with ongoing work as well, all shot blind and all printed on an inkjet printer. I need to put some of the pictures I’ve been working on for this online soon. Work is mental at the moment and once again I find myself with no time to get completely stuck into this.