PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

We have worked since 2019 under the unconductive trash label, which is an anagram of our home towns - Duchcov (Michal Pěchouček) and Traunstein (Rudi Koval). This fatalism-tinged pun metaphorically expresses the internal aspects of the joint working method. Trash accumulates during every creative process and production. Trash is an important and familiar concept from the landscape of cultural values. The The retardation property of the unconductive rules out the regulation of trash and the control of the direction of creative energy. The brand is therefore our distilled manifesto - in art, we do not consider it important to finish things. What matters is the beginning of creative activity, not its completed result. The purpose of our collaboration is to remove the layers of the past and discover a new artistic identity.

The starting point of our artistic interaction is the easel painting - it proved to be a suitable and accessible means in a joint search for a new linguistic and content identity. At the core of our collaboration is the desire to shed the layers of our own past, i.e. to learn to forget our original artistic handwritings. We explore a new painterly handwriting through different materials and methods, including the space and time dimensions of art. In a pair, it is possible to discover new subjects for artistic retelling and new ordinariness. We experiment with artistic means while trying to "moderate" the intensity and interconnectedness of joint everyday activities. We include in art not only common knowledge but also ordinary experiences, situations that can be planned and experienced together. We focus on one-day and long-term challenges. We try to employ this experience of subtle everyday reality in robust wholes such as exhibitions.

The title of the current exhibition LARGELY OBSERVED is inspired by one of the terms of the European macroseismic earthquake scale. It identifies a degree of critical condition that is widely observed, but need not be taken fatally - for us it is a possible expression of the quality of the viewer's experience, the power of the inner experience of an artwork. The exhibition opens with our first collaborative works, burning daylight (2020), and continues with unconductive chronology (2023), a series of forty-eight paintings sewn together. At the centre are two extensive cycles of paintings, gold tint (2022) and virgin blue (2023), inspired by research into visual evidence of suppressed stories of the past. We have conceived the exhibition as a dialogue between two worlds: past and present, big and small. Through monochromatic work with colour and figurative detail, we attempt to tell real stories of the 20th century that resonate with our everyday lives today.

virgin blue (2023)

This installation of paintings and a monumental work close to architecture, design and large-scale relief painting is inspired by period photographs of one of England's first women football teams, Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., which was formed during the First World War. Despite achieving considerable popularity and sporting success, the team faced strong opposition from the Football Association which banned women from playing on their pitches and stadiums for fifty years. The reason for the ban was to "protect" women who, according to the association, were not physically capable of playing football. The series of paintings thus refers not only to the pitfalls of women's emancipation but also to the period of the world wars, marked by many structural social changes.

burning daylight (2020)

The first works of unconductive trash were created as an experiment - the artists jointly modified paintings created by Rudi Koval in 2017. The burning daylight series thus captures the moment of the encounter of two artistic personalities and their incompatible handwritings. A dialogue between abstraction and figuration, the painterly approached surface and the drawing of a sewing machine, the removal of a canvas and its stretching onto a different format, the elimination of what already existed as well as the clarification of work with paint were all part of a search for new procedures and subjects.

unconductive chronology (2023)

The continuous series of forty-eight paintings is conceived as a monumental element in space and as a sequence of film frames for a motion picture. The individual canvases show an intervention that shrinks their surface through repeated stitching, thus creating volume. The fabric creases irreversibly even after stretching on a wooden frame. Unconductive trash works on two sewing machines simultaneously, with minimum checking of the result and according to specified conditions that are repeated. In doing so, they capture a personal unity in something that is both work and idleness, that is both festive and ordinary.

unconductive loop (2023)

The subject of this interactive installation is the mechanics of the sewing machine, its magical sound and its unsurpassed contribution to human civilization. It is the stepping mechanism of the machine that made the movement of the film strip in the camera possible. The driving force behind this work is the observing audience - without their presence the work wouldn’t exist.

gold tint (2022)

The gold tint cycle of paintings is loosely inspired by documentary photographs of everyday life of soldiers during the Second World War. For example, a series of reportage photographs taken in 1940 by John Topham while working in the RAF intelligence shows a home guard unit in Gravesend, England rehearsing an entertaining Christmas show - the soldiers performed in female roles and clothes. The rehearsal was interrupted by an alarm and everyone had to move to a defensive position, there was no time to unmask and change into uniforms. The whole story, including the rehearsal, is documented in several telling snapshots. They capture the desire of the British soldiers to forget the reality of war for a while, to have fun and to make present the missing female element - to let the yearning for it sublimate. The images were censored for a long time by the British Ministry of Information to prevent them from being exploited by the enemy as they placed the soldier-hero in a completely new situation.

Gender parody and cross-dressing common in the theatre are not unique in the military, either as evidenced, for example, in the book Soldier Studies (Martin Dammann, ed., Soldier Studies. Cross-Dressing in der Wehrmacht, Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2019), with amateur photographs showing scenes featuring German soldiers dressed up as women - scenes that were in direct contradiction to Nazi ideology.

The scenes in the pictures captured through specific gestures and situations symbolically touch upon many aspects of today's discussion on gender stereotypes, human desires and various forms of identities. The artists want to emphasise, among other things, that men are capable of absolute empathy and that femininity is inherent to them. The search for normality and everyday ordinariness is natural for human beings, even in the chaos of war.

macroseismic scale, 2022

A figurative transcription of the European macroseismic scale which, unlike the older Richter scale, takes into account the intensity of human perception depending on physical changes. For example, the degree of largely observed defines the critical condition that is largely observed inside buildings. At this level, no one can pretend not to notice anything. Earthquakes inside buildings are felt by many, but only rarely outside.

you have no power over me, 2023

The textual intervention in the gallery window involves the line used to break the curse at the end of the fantasy film Labyrinth (directed by Jim Henson, 1986). Here, it is intended as a possible analogy to the figures of soldiers, or rather, to their experience of chaos and their desire to get out of it.

PAVLA SCERANKOVÁ / THE OLD LIGHT IN THE GALAXIES DEPARTMENT

27.09.2014 - 13.11.2014

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
27/9 – 13/11/2014
Opening: 25/9/2014 at 7pm
Curator: Jan Zálešák

How many things that surround us do we really understand? But we can still use them, touch them, speak to them, put them into motion. This deep, while unconscious understanding that seems to be inscribed in the motions and that is build by motions, touches and gestures, takes an important place in the work of Pavla Sceranková.

In the early stages of her career, Pavla Sceranková was searching for ways to "animate" - how to depict or categorize movement - while remaining in the area of sculpture or object creation. An example result of this search are the objects from the cycle Memory as a new reality (2006). A slightly different approach has been used in a more recent series of objects Yes or No (2010). Items that we well know as silent partners in our rooms and kitchens (lamp, porcelain dinner service) seem to explode in front of us, but just before the fractions have managed to fly in all directions, someone pressed the PAUSE button. In addition to works in which the motion remains only a kind of unfinished option Sceranková also creates sculptures and objects, that the audience can touch, and therefore they can not only by looking, but also by moving update the contents that are placed in them.

The installation in the Fait Gallery MEM is loosely based on the author's exhibitions Woman on the Moon (Old Town Hall GHMP, 2013) and Constellation (Atrium MG in Brno, 2013). In both she was searching for ways to expand the dimensions of the viewer's experience and understanding tied to personal and physical experience of a metaphorical move in the universe. Great and for the vast majority of people a truly unimaginable size of the world "out there" in these exhibitions formed a counterpoint to the "small" human experience again based in "small", familiar subjects.

The form of the installation in the MEM gallery was significantly influenced by meetings with Dr. Bruno Jungwiert from the Galaxies department at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Discussions with an expert on the dynamics and the evolution of galaxies brought Pavla Sceranková to a key theme of the exhibition, which is the collision of galaxies. In order to appreciate the drama of this event, we must be able to think in scales and in time periods that almost exceed our imagination. If the human observer was inside such a collision, he would not, because of the vast distances between (potentially) conflicting elements, notice anything at all.

This paradox intrigued the author and the desire to let the audience literally enter into the colliding structures became the starting point in the design of the exhibition. The symbolic move into intergalactic space is, on the material level of the installations, connected with the intimate space of the kitchen or the dining room - the space, which, aside from the already somehow outdated cultural stereotype characterising it as a purely female area, is primarily a family space, a space of harmony, but also an arena of conflicts and battles. If we put a piece of saucer or pot mounted to the end of the rotatable structure into motion, we risk a real crash and also animate a model of the universe. Therefore there is a crash of not only incommensurable formats, but also incommensurable time dimensions. The human time in which we are born, die, fall in love and hold deep hate is, in the context of "space-time" of a galactic collision, completely worthless. But maybe the opposite is also true, when a scientific version of the absolute crumbles under emotions, that may be put into a motion by a piece of rotating kitschy chinoiserie...

Jan Zálešák

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