KATARÍNA HLÁDEKOVÁ / TO START THE FIRE

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.

KATARÍNA HLÁDEKOVÁ / TO START THE FIRE

13.11.2013 - 10.01.2014

Fait Gallery PREVIEW
Dominican Square 10, Brno
13/11/2013 – 10/1/2014
Opening: 12/11/2013 at 6pm
Curator: Michal Pěchouček

Katarina Hládeková focuses her work on the magic of depicting, the conditions and mechanisms of vision, which she closely, but still intuitively, reveales through photographs, sculptures and installations. She deals with relationships between the subject and the technical image using only minimal resources. For her frugal and clear visual pieces she typically discovers clever ways to assess the potential plastic qualities of the plain white Bristol-board that she uses for producing most of her models for direct presentation or subsequent documentation.
For the Fait Gallery Katarina Hládeková has prepared an open cycle, where, as the name of the exhibition suggests, the phenomenon of fire rules. It is not an objective study, but rather that of uncovered poetic dreaming about the dangerously ambivalent, but mainly creative element. Hládeková respects fire as a dynamic and archetypal power. Her dreaming turns, with a certain nostalgia, to a fight, which seems to be finished a long time ago, to the very history of the technical image, the techniques of film and the dawn of the photographic media. That’s why the greatest emphasis in the images and objects is put on the localisation of the light source, shadow and it’s reflection, and also on the mechanism of imaging, photo montage, or the projection of moving images by praxinoscope. The references to pre-cinematic technologies, however, never become more important than the depicted object itself. Into the imaginary and carefully closed lab of this artist the outer reality penetrates only marginally through a small and carefully open gap. The depiction is as if defined by changed perspectives and the shifted scale of the whole item and details. We can see it all in a sort of closed environment where we find traces of the running processes and open forms.

Through this exhibition Hládeková steps slightly aside from the principles of museum or definitive framings and adjustments, that we, as her audience, are used to. It offers us a more authentic insight into her current creative workshop, because this time she has arranged the exhibition with much more spontaneity and left the relationships between objects in study in the germinating stage. Despite the conscious possibility of some disorder, her view remains acute, revealing and complete. Chaos is omitted. In the long term Hládeková sees chaos as a quality of a rather extreme nature. In words of the poet Paul Valéry: Any diversion is fatal, the artifact is destroyed. If the fire is too moderate or flames too much, it brings disaster on it’s whim .....

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