KAMILA MUSILOVÁ / UNDER THE DOILY WITH A DELICATE TEXTURE

As if the main contradiction of the present didn’t lie in the very problems we are currently facing, from climate change to the revival of populism and misinterpretation. Perhaps the most serious pitfall of today is our inability to share these problems and fears, as well as values, visions and solutions.

There is a name for our involvement with the world, its building and suffering — it’s simply work. We don’t necessarily have to understand it as an occupation but as a process in which our activities and ideas are given sense and co-shape the world in which we live.

By extension, art is not just the production of exhibitions and artworks; it enters our shared imagination, enriching it with images, visions and criticism. At our exhibition for the Fait Gallery we are trying to open up this process, to invite the viewer closer, to the podium which dominates the gallery space and provides the installations with a joint framework and context.

The platform is modified for art, as well as for work and leisure in the form of a co-working space and two in-built lounges supplemented with chairs from Pavla Sceranková’s previous art projects. The podium-table thus assigns the meaning to the individual installations while at the same time it also invites the audience to enter the process, the cycle of work and leisure giving sense to both works of art and our world.

Pavla Sceranková shows the human situation ruled by the current work culture. In a series of plasticine figurines created by the pupils from an art school (the work is called Klára) she lets us observe the dissolving of shapes and the blending and merging of matter. The number of endangered species becomes a metaphor for the current environmental issues, as well
as for joint and applied work which is inevitably multiplied, affected by social expectations, and still can be shared and useful and mediate values, including aesthetic ones.

Milada, again named after a person devising the particular project and working on it, combines an elastic suit with performance. It invites you to a flexible, enchanting but subjugating part-time life which enfolds you like tight-fitting underwear. In contrast, Miloš, a figure rooted in the gallery podium, seeks a base and anchoring, perhaps even the return to reflections on nature and the corresponding rhythm, harmony and deceleration.

Our presence, be it social time or personal experience, seems to develop in loops intersecting the show, as demonstrated by the Ilja installation. It is not just a suspended loom, the return of working techniques to the space of a former factory, the picking up of the threads of work which was interrupted. It also manifests the cyclic nature of work as such, the circle of knitting and undoing, work and leisure, creation and destruction.

Dušan Zahoranský incorporates in his work the subject of communication. In a series of fake phone calls written on dummy cell phones (Mária), he comments on the overwhelming presence of (online) communication today, as well as on the isolated, private, almost absurd dimension of the possibility of instant communication.

The monumental ring (Libor) encircling the gallery ramp brings to the space office furniture and the issues of the stereotypization and commodification of work, or semiocapitalism. Our work environment and application are often subordinated to phenomena such as open space, home office, flexitime, as well as the necessity to be constantly available on email, mobile phone and social networks. In this way, capitalism does not only appropriate our time and work but also the creation of meaning and sense.

In addition, Zahoranský views critically the idea of a universal, non-specific or fully transparent language. In a series of coloured grids of digital characters, Mirek and Kateřina, he stages a combination of type, communication and digital culture, while in the central installation entitled Dušan he symbolically “stole” the letters “o” from his own email communication.

The artist works in similar fashion with the sharing of films on the popular server uloz.to (Artur series). He cut one minute from each film and uploaded the files again; not only to alter the films circulating among the server users, but also to work further with the “stolen” time. This time appears to represent the negative of work time and circulation, the possibility of hiding (as an artist) and working outside the affective loops of digital communication and the capitalist order.

Project was created with financial support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and
Statutory city of Brno.

KAMILA MUSILOVÁ / UNDER THE DOILY WITH A DELICATE TEXTURE

08.02.2013 - 27.03.2013

Fait Gallery MEM & Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Božetěchova Street 1, Brno, Dominican Square 10, Brno
8/2 – 27/3/2013
Opening: 7/2/2013 at 7pm
Curator: Denisa Kujelová

The present projects by Kamila Musilová were realized especially within the medium of photography. Already here, however, appears her interest in other techniques in the processing of particular topics. It is mostly about the principle of “temporary installation” with the help of which the author intuitively creates new relationships between objects and their meaning and specific places. These objects are then transformed in space with the help of photography.

In the gallery MEM, Kamila Musilová steps out of the framework of a two dimensional image and presents a collection of objects and installations created specifically for this space. The exhibition title Under the doily with a delicate texture, that is borrowed from the convolute of the Cottager Church called The Book of cottages, is supposed to evoke the nostalgia associated with elapsed time. Kamila Musilová so indirectly refers to her own sentimental relationship with her grandparents and family in general, rooted family traditions and stereotypes, not always sweet memories which she tries to generalize from the intimate level to well known experience of us all. Doily as a bearer of stiffness, precision, order and peace and quiet at home semantically cuts through almost all exhibited works, whether in a form of an oversized wooden fence or as a flow of floating carpet fringes. Used ready-made objects from grandfather’s workshop refer to the thin line between do-it-yourself, unskillfulness and artistic creation. Substitution of surprising object dimensions (too big or too small) suggests a shift of the original meaning of things into an absurd level.

The whole exposition is overseen by the double portrait of Valentina Tereshkova and Yuriy Gagarin, the first “couple” in space, who are metaphorically seen by Musilová as futuristic parents of human race. The technical processing but rather evokes old wedding portraits hung above beds in bedrooms.
The second part of the exhibition located in the gallery Preview naturally follows and completes the spatial exhibition of the first part. Besides the photos of the older cycle Grandfather and Grandmother the artist installs video as well, whose individual footage takes place in various parts of the garden and the cottage of grandparents. These are static shots of real state of things, but by separating particular scenes there is a strange story about the life of local things and people.

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