"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.

Disko

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Arok Books

A photography book about contemporary Belarus by Andrew Miksys. TULIPS was chosen by TATE Modern photography curator, Simon Baker as one of best photobooks of 2016. Andrew Miksys began traveling regularly to Belarus in 2009 to photograph Victory Day, a holiday celebrating the Soviet victory over fascism and Nazi Germany. During the celebration, tractors, military equipment, and factory workers parade through the streets. Miksys returned year after year to photograph Victory Day and the other Soviet era holidays still celebrated in Belarus. "Andrew Miksys, a seasoned traveler, ventures into this outcrop of Soviet iconography with the eye of a trickster, searching for signs of intimacy and memory in a land of grand delusions. In Belarus, Soviet-style celebrations and repressions are not things of the past. This makes picturing Belarus a tricky proposition, for the space between permissible and forbidden is very narrow. Framing this slivered landscape requires mastering the art of persuasion, and the ability to revive the personal within the frames of the official. Knowing this, Miksys builds his Belorussian itinerary as a conceptual maneuver, following the ideological formulas of mass celebrations of Soviet history in expectation of finding memories of the future. In the search for the space in between, he builds his itinerary as a conceptual sleight of hand, following the ideological formulas in expectation of finding the human landscape. His photographs are not so much a record of Belarus in bloom - an archive of official jubilation - as a diorama of the solitude of the celebration. Elegiac in color, this marvelous exposé registers Belarus in disjunction. In his photographs of national holidays, Miksys enters not only the fractured nature of Belarus and its inherently split personality, but also the twofold reality of the country. He shows us the hollowness of history in the aftermath of ersatz Soviet celebrations." - text by Laimonas Briedis

Tulips

Andrew Miksys

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Books by Arok Books

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Disko

Tulips