Two exhibitions in Britain lift the lid on post-Soviet Lithuania but demonstrate a generational gap in their methods of interpretation.

A gentle looking man wanders around The White Space Gallery, taking pictures of people talking and examining photographs. Antanas Sutkus is Lithuania's leading photographer and the pictures on the wall are his. He has just published a book of prints that had remained as negatives in an archive in his home town of Vilnius for many years.

He has brought a part of his collection to London in order to share his vision. "People of Lithuania" is an ongoing project, started in 1976. Sutkus has been photographing the everyday and the extraordinary. It's a project that asks you to contemplate life in a Communist Baltic state. The exhibition ranges from beautifully staged portraits of vulnerable-looking children posing alongside their parents to poignant portraits such as 'After the Wedding' which suggests a couple's unenthusiastic realisation that the best years of their lives are behind them.

Sutkus is enamoured by the power of a portrait: "I bought my first camera when I was 11 or 12," he says. "I saved up thirteen roubles. I was saving for a bike but then I got tuberculosis so all I could get was a camera and when I made my first photograph, and a person's face appeared on a piece of paper, I felt like God".

Sutkus's fascination with the aesthetic oddities of life is central to the exhibition but it suffers from a lack of chronological order and context. The photos are haunting, but how do they fit in with us and most importantly with the artist himself?

Deimantas Narkevicius' exhibition at Bristol's Arnolfini solves this by presenting a body of similar works but which shapes them in a more complex way. A younger Lithuanian artist, he was doubtlessly influenced and weaned on similar experiences to Sutkus but displays more experimental tendencies.

"Once in a XX Century" is a series of documentary film installations. He looks at the history of his country and reworks it to challenge the reliability of photography and documentary films, thereby asking the question, how accurately can history be recorded or remembered? The 'XX' of the title of the exhibition can be read as referring to the twentieth century or as a blank to be filled in by the viewer, alluding to history's habit of repeating itself.

One of the films (with the same title as the exhibition) uses footage from the Lithuanian National TV archive of the dismantling of Lenin's statue in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here, Narkevicius has edited the footage so that it plays backwards. This makes the crowd appear to be celebrating the erection of the statue, rather than its demise and shows how easy it is to twist and manipulate the truth, especially through the mediums of documentary filmmaking or photography.

Narkevicius' other installations look at personal histories and how mingled and intertwined they can become with national ones. He works with history to examine the possibility of creativity and artistic pioneering within a restrictive system. Who better to dispute the force-fed realities of Communist Lithuania than a photographer and an artist. For, as the saying goes, the camera (almost) never lies.

Antanas Sutkus is at the White Space Gallery until 2nd June

St Peter's Church, Vere Street, London W1G 0DQ

www.whitespacegallery.co.uk

Deimantas Narkevicius is at The Arnolfini until 2nd July

16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA

0117 917 2300

www.arnolfini.org.uk