Images and sound will combine in perfect harmony on Saturday, November 19th at Saint George’s Arts and Heritage Centre in Mitchelstown with a unique cultural event.
The Lithuanian Ambassador to Ireland will be opening a photographic exhibition and reception at 6.30pm by an internationally renowned Lithuanian photographic artist, Veronika Sleivyte (1906–1998), who was active in the inter-war period.
Over the past year, 250 originals and previously unseen negatives of her work were exhibited in the Lithuanian National Art Gallery and these are now coming to Saint George’s for its first photographic exhibition. Called ‘Sometimes Vera looks like this,’ Sleivyte explores both the world and herself. With creative use of different angles, different lighting and a different composition, she allows the same person, the same fragment of space to become a new artwork. More than eighty of the artist’s best works have been brought to Ireland and will be on display in Saint George’s for a month before it moves on to the UK, Norway and then the United States.
These photographs by such a distinguished photographer, especially her self-portraits, allow us to see a modern, bold, and very charismatic personality who has found her place not only in Lithuania, but also in the global context of photography in the 1940s. Although her work may not be so well known in photography circles in Ireland, it has the capacity to inspire and provoke thought and imagination.
THE SOLAS QUARTET
After the opening of the exhibition on Friday night, at 8pm the Solas Quartet, which is part of the National String Quartet, will perform a concert of music by Boccherini, Kinsella, Beach, Dowland and Mendelssohn in B Flat featuring Irish Chamber Orchestra leader Katherine Hunka, Marja Gaynor, Cian Ó Dúill, Aoife Nic Athlaoich and Ed Creedon.
Admission to the exhibition is free. Tickets for the concert are €20. These are available on Eventbrite (link below), by calling 087-8113611 or at the door on the evening of the performance.
The Solas Quartet, which is part of the National String Quartet Foundation, first performed as the 2020 Quartet in online concerts during that autumn’s lockdown. Now they have developed a fascinatingly varied programme spanning five centuries which reflect the wide-ranging musical talents and specialities of the quartet’s members.
For the second half of the concert they will be joined by Cork violist Ed Creedon, who will perform Mendelssohn’s brilliant B flat string quintet.
This concert is part of a tour supported by the Arts Council, RTE Lyric FM and by Cork County Council. The exhibition has been organised by members of the Lithuanian community in the Mitchelstown area, especially with the guidance of Neringa Vaitiekaitiene, who formerly lived in Mitchelstown, and her mother Regina, who still lives in the locality.
