Curated by Lenka Kukurová.
This exhibition project by Kateřina Závodová is based on narrative. At the moment of entering the space the visitor becomes a script writer and actor at the same time.
The starting point and the key to the stories is a calender containing a list of names of missing people. Almost each day is associated with the portrait and name of a missing person. The artist speculates about their fate after they disappeared, and sketches out some of the possible circumstances of their lives. Short stories - video studies - relate issues such as hope, falling, escaping, or disapearing in time and space, or chance incident, while being captured in time. The theme of missing people is dramatically, emotionally and tragically loaded, but the artist is presenting it in a reserved way and and without pathos.
The relationship between time and space is important, as alluded to in the title of the exhibition. Time is a rather abstract phenomenon, not easy to perceive with our senses, but it plays a pivotal role in our lives. The electronic object displayed in the exhibition space counts down the running time, and in this way represents the uneasy fact of the stream of time, which is both linear and cyclic, as in our ability to “travel against the current” through memory. At the same time, the work hints at the danger of falling into a temporal vortex.
The space is defined by a grid of small points spread across the floor of the gallery and the inner yard. The points are painted on the floor and create a symbolic sense of absense, of somebody missing. The “stories” are fragmented and without begininng or end; there is no plot, and the narrative structures are open to interpretation, so that the visitors are given a real and imaginative space to provide their own stories. The video stories are captured between moments of time: a skater, instead of performing figures, is sitting on the ice; a girl releases a ball from the ground; a man is caught in a loop while jumping; the rotating isolators are gateways to another dimension.
The exhibition “Intervals” is the result of long-term artistic research in a theme which is both general and very personal. Each portrait that appears in a specially designed calender, published for the occasion of the exhibition, represents an open-ended story and the starting point for the imagination about the fates of the missing people.
Kateřina Závodová (b. 1975) studied at AVU in Praze (the Conceptual school of Miloš Šejn and the Intermedia School of Milan Knížák).
The exhibition project is represented by a published catalog in the form of a limited edition calendar. The research and the exhibition was supported by the grant from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.
