From October 30 to December 28, 2025, the Photography Museum will host a solo exhibition of photographs by the renowned Lithuanian photographer Aleksandras Macijauskas, titled The Circle of Life. The opening event will take place on October 30, 2025, at 5:30 p.m. Art critic Tomas Pabedinskas, will participate in the event along with other guests.

The exhibition presents four of his iconic photographic series: Veterinary Clinics, Lithuanian Rural Markets, Summer, and Parades. Created in the 1970s and 1980s, these photographic cycles reveal the theatre of everyday life, human emotions, and the rhythm of communal existence in Soviet Lithuania. The works were later brought together in the artist’s book My Lithuania (Editors: Daniela Mrázková and Vladimír Remeš, Thames&Hudson Ltd, London, 1991, EN) – one of the most significant syntheses of Macijauskas’s creative vision.

In Macijauskas’s work, courage meets irony and tenderness, allowing viewers to perceive life as a continuous and ever-repeating circle – filled with light, absurdity, and poetry. The exhibition reflects the artist’s ability to recognise the pulse of life in the most ordinary moments. As the artist himself once said, everything that matters is already present in his photographs.

The Circle of Life unfolds as a reflection on continuity, return, and transformation – a life experienced as a whirlpool, where moments of turbulence and calm coexist. At specific points within this motion, we pause to look back, to take account of what has passed, and to trace the paths that have brought us here.

This exhibition invites such a pause through the words of Aleksandras Macijauskas, whose personal letter to Czech curator and critic Daniela Mrazková was later used as the introduction to his book My Lithuania. In it, the artist reflects on his life, his creative path, and the shaping forces that defined his photographic vision. The letter reveals the human dimension behind four of his major series – Veterinary Clinics, Lithuanian Rural Markets, Summer, and Parades – which form the core of both the exhibition and the book.

These series together map the circle of existence that Macijauskas observed in Lithuania: the rhythms of rural and urban life, its rituals, absurdities, and quiet heroism. At the same time, the letter testifies to the profound influence of Czechoslovak photography, and especially Revue Fotografie magazine, on Lithuanian artistic circles. This link illuminates the broader intercultural intersections of the period.

Conceived during the final years of the Soviet Union but published only after its collapse, My Lithuania stands as a dual document – capturing one artist’s life on the micro level and reflecting the transition of entire epochs on the macro level. In this sense, Macijauskas’s work closes and reopens the circle: an intimate story intertwined with the larger currents of history.

The exhibition features works from the collection of the Photography Museum, a branch of the Šiauliai Aušra Museum, and the author’s archive.

Exhibition curator – Valentyn Odnoviun

Exhibition communication designer – Darius Linkevičius

Organiser – The branch of the Šiauliai Aušra Museum – the Photography Museum

Sponsor – the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania