TOMÁŠ SVOBODA / ONE SECOND IN THE LIFE OF JULIA ROBERTS

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.

TOMÁŠ SVOBODA / ONE SECOND IN THE LIFE OF JULIA ROBERTS

02.11.2012 - 01.12.2012

Fait Gallery MEM
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
02/11 – 1/12/2012
Opening: 1/11/2012 at 7pm
Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Tomáš Svoboda chose one second of the film with the American actress Julia Roberts and spread it to 25 separate images. He proceeded from the most common frame frequency used in film and television and he dissected the transient moment of one second, which is so short to which under normal circumstances nobody pays the slightest attention, into basic visual elements, as if it was possible to see two adjacent layers of the actress’s existence – Julie Roberts in the role of the second Julia Roberts “per se“.

Tomáš Svoboda belongs to an informal circle of artists using methods and means of expression of other disciplines. He oscillates between literature, stage design and film and combines them the most consistently in gallery installations focused on alternative forms of narration. He always maintains economy of means of expression and the model quality; he often works with curt, descriptive texts and their simple composition. The installation is completed with fragments of three-dimensional set pieces or architectural structures that refer to ephemeral structures in film and television studios.

Also in the spatial installation called Jedna vteřina života Julie Roberts / One second in the life of Julia Roberts we can find a number of the above-mentioned elements. Instead of narration, however, the main attention is focused on the specific existential duplication of an actor. Despite the performed anatomical study, the “fiction“ and the “non-fiction“ remain inseparable substances. Experiment – if it ever was an experiment – failed. To a scientist, such findings could cause a significant damage to his confidence and undermine his mental balance. To the contrary, for an artist, it could mean a poetic potential. Emptied space is filled with experience of different perception of an image which were flowing and now don’t flow anymore, a story which is necessary to put together piece by piece as a puzzle from each image and the time that began to expand, despite its original insipidity.

Jiří Ptáček

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