REFLECTION

Installation in the public space of the city – DOOKA Gallery, Prague (with Zdeňka Hanáková), 2021

Photo: Zdeňka Hanáková

The art project is based on the communication of the glass DOOKA Gallery with the exterior of the city: it expects viewers walking down the Prague´s Husova Street to directly interfere. It is an artist´s confrontation with the public space. It asks the passers-by to stop and share their universal experience with the fragility of life. The installation plays with the theme of act, with this vulnerable form of human existence. The deconstruction of forms and distortions of proportions out of the “normal” change the aesthetics of human body, evoking feelings of tension and disrupting the concentration.

Both co-authors (a sculptor and a photographer) normally use different media in their work. Here, though, the means of their artistic expression have interconnected. Both artists share a long-term interest in updating the representation of human figure and in defining space through interactive elements. Large-format black-and-white photographs of female acts by Zdeňka Hanáková are cut into various fragments by Lenka Stejskalová. The aesthetics of body and of its curves gets uncompromisingly broken, through a nervous rhythm, into atypical perspectives. They are deformed by means of reflective or semi-translucent surfaces of glass. A two-dimension photograph thus turns into a space installation obtaining its third dimension. Dynamically set in motion, the patchwork shatters the theme of a body into several simultaneous dimensions. The image constantly changes as a viewer is walking down the street. It pulsates as unpredictably as a kaleidoscope. It makes up an existential image of our precarious certainties, of our lifestyle routines, of our seemingly safe relationships, of our plans, of our lack of privacy and concentration – all smashed into pieces.