Disko

"The discos of Lithuania were once Soviet offices, detention centers, weapons storage, rare Lithuanian mushroom-packing plants... who knows? One can dream of their former incarnations and feel that, no matter how grim, they are being violently shoved into history by the hungry young bodies Andrew photographs. These fashionably thin embodiments are literally the heirs of hunger. Poured into Western jeans and poses, they look like bewildered time-travelers who emerged in these shifting prisons to liberate them for dance. Andrew's photographs capture a generation born to bewilderment: the disko kids still carry the past in their eyes and hard-to-maintain indifference, but they are the creatures of a very brief moment in time, one that will never ever exist again except in these pictures. Miksys has caught a fleeting world that emanates death and hope in the pulses of ephemeral disco lights." - ANDREI CODRESCU For ten years Andrew Miksys traveled the back roads of Lithuania photographing teenagers in village discos. Most of these discos are located in Soviet-era culture houses where Miksys would sometimes find discarded Lenin paintings, old Soviet movie posters, gas masks, and other remnants of the Soviet Union. He became fascinated by all this debris of a dead empire and the teenagers who visited the clubs. It seemed like a perfect backdrop to make a series of photographs about young people in Lithuania, a crumbling past, and the uncertain future of a new generation all together in one room.