Date: 28.05.2015 — 21.06.2015
Beginning: 19:00
The exhibition was named after the book of essays of a Polish prosaist Olga Tokarczukova. In the eponymus text Tokarczukova approaches an experience from childhood, when, as a little girl, she saw a bear queueing in the shop. A conflict, when she was confronted with a gaze of the „adults“, who accused her of lying, she perceives as an important event, which radically invaded her trust into authority of parents. As she writes, at that moment she realized how subjective the truth is and how everyone lives in a contradiction between told life-myth and seemingly objective „reality“.
All three exhibiting artists have in common an experience with book and magazine ilustration, and also animation. The world, is connected with an imaginary play, with an indication, asociative game of discontinuous elements. By formal affinity (undertaking of stylization, narration) all similarities end – they are influenced by different ideal background. Their approaches to reflexion of social order, history or our presence fairly diverge and all of them asserts another kind of resistance towards society, even by an indication, choice of topics or their own life practice. Opinions, attitudes or „mere“ emotions don´t need to be boldly visible, they are put to the distribution of visual signs itself and they communicate topics of gender, social banishment, ecology.
Ladislava Gažiová is an empathetic observer who exploits a formal stylization to demythologize serious social preconceptions. Her work is a chaining and connecting of attentively chosen images, which she eventually reduces up to the abstracted signs. Her work is primarily formed by persistent interest in feeling of people banished from regular society, and that is pursuant to Ethnic group or social status. At the etc. gallery she evolves her interest about post-colonial condition in Africa, where she has focused on reflection of Ugandan Art Academy, in which implemented European education according to classic western canon encounters with re-finding of own nature since the 30´s of the 20th century. Mutual encountering of currents of thoughts provokes contradiction in the local artistic community (and not only in it), which are still recent.
Eva Maceková doesn´t perceive herself as an artist. She is more known on the ground of a book illustration (for children). Her creation, which oscillates amongst technically mastered drawing and broad expressive style, often engages with abundance systematically sought information to each of her series. Thus her work presented in etc. gallery carries inside many references to steady imagination of hell and involves scenes from re-discovered apocrypha of the New testament, suggestively describing apocalyptic vision of the end of world. Thanks to Eva´s impressive imagination we can see fair of fantastic creatures, performing nonsensical actions and rituals those are upsetting fictions of human phantasy and subconsciousness.
To Veronika Vlková her work means a point, in which intersect many of her interests; coming out mainly from her bias in shaped image of animation. Latin word „animatio“, in Czech „oživení“ (in Eng. revival, recovery), seems to be Veronika´s fundamental principle which serves to fill up her artistic visions. She creates staged like spaces, in which we find various combinations of classical fine art techniques together with digital image. A splicing of different expressional devices serves for re-looking at ordinarily used objects and everyday rituals, which don´t get to far from peculiar concept of animism. Subtle assessments of narration, „small allegories“, instantly reflect the experienced life events.
Olga Tokarczukova prudently talks about creation of images, with the consciousness of spectacularity of our culture, focused on production of attractive visual objects, thus she doesn´t believe in the instant effects of visuality. Though she in her books lets to talk the imaginative literary figures about our society with even bigger „truthfulness“, then it would be done by „real“ person. I am convinced that the artworks of exhibited female authors have also similar abilities as these literary figures do. It shows up, that imagination, the quality to create highly plausible illusions, applies to unspoken levels of our humanity.
Curator: Martin Prudil
