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6 September - 8 October, 2010. After a successful show at the St Martin-in-the-Fields Gallery in May, the photography exhibition Urban Clones: from emotion to reality will be open from 6 September to 8 October at the Lithuanian Embassy in London. The exhibition reveals emotional and factual connections between the cities of two countries - the United Kingdom and Lithuania. 12 participants of the exhibition created their clones specifically for this project.

In London and Vilnius, the capital cities located at two different ends of Europe, there are two places - two fascinating urban clones - which certainly deserve the right to be displayed in Ripley's Believe it or Not. In both of these cities you will find a bridge crossing a river (don’t laugh – it is only the beginning of a chain of coincidences) with a power plant on one side, and a row of shapeless high-rise apartment blocks on the other. In Vilnius, this territory is next to the Sports Palace; its equivalent in London is located next to Battersea Park. Curiously, the owners named the two estates in a similar way – the one in Vilnius is known as The Apartments of King Mindaugas, its British clone – the Warwick Building (as at it happens it was William the Conqueror who built his castle in Warwick!) Finally, the bridge – power plant – apartment block triangle in both cities is followed and completed by a stadium –Žalgiris in Vilnius, and one without a name in Battersea Park.

This coincidence, of course, could not pass unnoticed, it simply had to be visualized - that is how the idea to organize the photo-exhibition was born. The main point behind the project was very clear – among the large community of Lithuanians living in the UK, as well as businessmen and tourists that cruise between the two countries, there will definitely be at least a handful of enthusiastic photographers who will appreciate the creative challenge offered by the exhibition.

The participating artists personalized and extended both the thematic and geographical framework of the exhibition proposed by the curator Austėja Mackelaitė and the Lithuanian Embassy. They looked for and captured not only physical resemblances, but also emotional points of contact. The works that were selected for the exhibition, both funny and sentimental, paradoxical and sensitively coded, reflect the wide variety of responses to the task at hand. The medieval fabric of Oxford and Vilnius, urban Sunday afternoon fragments, self-reflective skyscraper surfaces, and laconic stories that accompany these images invite the visitors of the exhibition to search for associations rather than oppositions in the history and present of the two countries.

Participating artists: Liudas Giedraitis, Andrius Juknys, Vilma Matelytė, Dalia Merečinskaitė, Ernestas Parulskis, Marijus Petrušonis, Ignius Pupinis, Danguolė Ragažinskaitė, Lina Soblytė, Skirmantė Udrėnaitė, Tomas Urbelionis, Kristina Zdanevičiūtė.

Exhibition open from 6 September to 8 October, 2010. 

Monday - Friday, from 10am to 4pm, admission free.

Lithuanian Embassy in London, 84 Gloucester Place, W1U 6AU. 

Kristina Zdanevičiūtė

Marijus Petrušonis