Echoes and Remnants by Krista Svalbonas

The 20/20 Photo Festival is proud to present our 2025 featured exhibit with Philadelphia artist Krista Svalbonas. Responding to the theme of this year’s festival Structures, Svalbonas will be presenting three interwoven series in a solo show titled “Echoes and Remnants” at the Bottling House Gallery at KieranTimberlake. The series explores Baltic resistance, displacement, and cultural survival. Rooted in personal history and ancestral memory, this work reflects on the impact of Soviet occupation across generations, landscapes, and architectures. Together, these series ask how landscapes, buildings, and material traditions carry memory, identity, and resistance. They honor those who fought, fled, and endured—and invite viewers to consider what survives in the aftermath of struggle. 

From the Artist:

My work explores ideas of home, dislocation, and the profound impact of architecture and landscape on cultural identity and human psychology. As the child of Latvian and Lithuanian parents who arrived in the United States as refugees after World War II, I have long been compelled by the tension between belonging and exile. My parents spent years in displaced-person camps in Germany—temporary, impersonal structures appropriated to house thousands of stateless people. 

In my series “Displacement”, I conducted extensive archival research to locate, visit, and photograph many of these sites. Today, their ordinary facades conceal the tumultuous lives once held inside: the daily uncertainty, the plea letters begging foreign governments for food and protection, and the fear of forced repatriation. Through a process of laser cutting, I merge these archival letters with my photographs by burning the text into the images, an echo of the trauma that shaped these communities. Over time, the lace-like words consume the buildings, rendering them fragile and inseparable from the precarious lives they sheltered.

“What Remains”  investigates buildings in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia that were built during Soviet occupation. During this period, cultural buildings were repurposed into warehouses, churches were demolished, and stark, cheaply constructed structures were built, along with a program of cultural suppression that left scars on the landscape that remain today. Despite this erasure, Baltic people preserved their cultural identity through folk traditions such as weaving. I combined my photographs of Soviet-era architecture with traditional Baltic textile patterns, laser-cut directly into the prints. The juxtaposition of cold concrete and delicate motifs highlights both the oppressive weight of totalitarianism and the quiet power of craft as defiance.

My most recent work, “Echoes of Resistance”, explores the forests that sheltered the Baltic Partisan movement—fighters who, in the aftermath of World War II, resisted Soviet occupation deep in the forest in secret underground bunkers, in hopes of reclaiming sovereignty and preserving national identity. Utilizing the 19th-century anthotype photographic technique—which employs natural plant pigments—I infuse each image with hues derived from the local flora, capturing the unique colors found in these locations. The process reflects nature’s role as refuge and silent witness.

Across these bodies of work, I examine how landscapes and built environments hold memory—how they shape people and how people, in turn, resist, adapt, and leave traces of their struggle. My images become layered meditations on endurance, identity, and the quiet persistence of culture against forces that seek to erase it.
 
About Krista Svalboas 
Krista Svalbonas holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies. Her work has been exhibited at prestigious venues, including Paris Photo, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Spartanburg Art Museum in South Carolina, Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Klompching Gallery, and ISE Cultural Foundation in New York. Her pieces are included in private collections and public institutions such as LACMA in Los Angeles, the Cesis Art Museum in Latvia, the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in North Carolina, the Woodmere Art Museum, and Temple University in Philadelphia. 
 
Svalbonas has received numerous awards, including the Penumbra Photogravure award (2025), the Center for Photographic Art Artist Grant (2022), the Baumanis Creative Projects Grant (2020), the Rhonda Wilson Award (2017), the Puffin Foundation Grant (2016), and a Bemis Fellowship (2015). Recently, she held solo exhibitions in Copenhagen, Denmark; Tallinn, Estonia; Augsburg, Germany; Vilnius, Lithuania; and Kedainiai, Lithuania. She is an associate professor of photography at St. Joseph’s University and resides in Philadelphia, where she continues her work. 
 
About the 20/20 Photo Festival 
The 20/20 Photo Festival is a celebration of photography that brings together the Philadelphia photo community through city-wide exhibitions, educational programming, and a photo book fair. Originally organized in 2020 by representatives from Gravy Studio, The Halide Project, and Wanderlife Gallery, the festival has built a strong reputation from its inaugural year as a month-long virtual event to its current in-person manifestation. It brings together a wide range of perspectives from emerging and established photographers from Philadelphia and beyond, reflecting the diversity of contemporary photography, and foregrounds the goal of making art accessible and bringing it into the public sphere through free programming designed to inspire and educate. This includes exhibitions, workshops and demonstrations, artist talks, panel discussions, and a renowned photo book fair.