Roland Barthes famously wrote that every photograph is a certificate of presence.¹ In Indre Serpytyte’s series, A State of Silence (2005-2006), each image is also a symbol of absence. Consisting of a dozen 20 x 24 inch glossy C-type print still life photographs, these images pay homage to Serpytyte’s father, a Lithuanian military officer who disappeared in mysterious circumstances during the artist’s adolescence. While Serpytyte and her mother were summarily told he had died in a car crash, they were given very little information as to the exact circumstances of his death.

The Lithuanian papers wrote that it was a painful misfortune, a catastrophe when the Head of Government Security died… No one seemed to know the details, or could provide straightforward answers… For me, this was sufficient proof. He had been eliminated. All that remains is silence, unknown circumstances, hidden motivation — chilling absence. This was my father, the subject of my indefatigable investigations.  

A State of Silence is fundamentally an investigation of loss: on the surface a blunt and factual display of evidence, but on a deeper level a rigorous forensic probe into a painfully unresolved facet of the artist’s life and psyche.

As if in an interrogation chamber, a lineup of mundane objects is lit clinically against a black, sepulchral background and then photographed face on: an officer’s cap, an old typewriter, an upturned, institutional-looking chair, a disconnected telephone, a shredder shredding blank documents and Serpytyte’s father’s passport. These sullen objects stand in for the artist’s father, raising his identity as government official in charge of state security. They index as well the impenetrable bureaucratic state apparatus to which he belonged, and which she must now confront in her endless search for him. In an ironic reversal of roles, Serpytyte must now interrogate the interrogators.

These photographs are formally rigorous: crisp, immediate and stark displays of material evidence. Using photography, Serpytyte confronts and challenges the chilling absence of her father by creating symbolic presence, as if the reality of the photograph-object itself could somehow fill the void, ratifying her father’s existence and, by extension, her own. In La Chambre Claire, Barthes claims that a photograph always exists as a sort of proof, proclaiming of its referent, ça a été: it has really existed. For Serpytyte, it is almost as if the very physicality of both the mundane objects on show and the material object of the photograph itself would be enough to give substance, not only to her case but to the ghost-father himself.

But her glossy images are self-contained and unyielding, as are the inanimate things she portrays. Totally sealed, they give away nothing, like the faceless and impenetrable bureaucracy the artist repeatedly slams against in her futile quest for answers. They are in a state of silence, but they also raise the silence of the state when confronted with its own abuses. Cold, comfortless signifiers of loss, Serpytyte’s images point to the plight of the individual in the face of the corruption of power. They are deceptively simple images that pack a big punch as indictments of institutional injustice. Like the work of Doris Salcedo, they are restrained yet powerful images that bear witness to the terrible human ordeal that arises from traumatic loss; a poignant, elegiac tribute to a missing father, but also to she who is left behind.

¹ Roland Barthes, ‘La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie’ (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, Gallimard et Seuil, 1980) 120