The exhibition title – Grey Zone - describes an intermedial situation, and a sort of borderland where things cannot be clearly identified since their meanings branch out into several sometimes completely opposing directions.
The body of the works at the exhibition is composed of found objects whose function and content are reflected by the artists from three different positions. The objects and installations bring together a large variety of media and open up several layers of meaning as well. The essence of the works can perhaps best be summed up by the concept of missing tangibility. The artists have established unusual situations, surreal places and are searching for answers to the questions of how creating existence for something that is in fact absent can be possible; how every well-known story is transformed if we look at it through the “filter” of individual narration; how is it possible to play tennis in peculiar, inverted positions with modified sports equipment; how an object changes if we strip it’s original function?
Two of the artists presented at the Grey Zone exhibition: Peter Puklus and Pavla Sceranková are more familiar names to the Slovak public, whereas for the Romanian artist Mihut Boscu Kafchin, this is his first exhibition in Slovakia.
Mihut Boscu Kafchin lives and works in Cluj Napoca. He is building his own world which he has baptised the Kingdom of Mihutia and whose foundations are made up of the mystification of the world of objects in the spirit of scientific and fantastic research. He combines his ironic and refined view of the world in several media; ceramics, painting, drawing, video, installation and sculpting. His piece entitled Figurative Sport (2012) creates sketches for impossible sports. As a result of the transformed sports equipment it is impossible to play the game following the original rules and thus the image of a pointless and absurd discipline is created. For Boscu Kafchin this metaphysical tennis is in fact a metaphor for visual art, since the creative process for him is some kind of a sport, only a lonely one which cannot be played with anyone else.
Peter Puklus lives in Budapest and brings his ideas to life through the medium of photography, recently becoming more and more experimental and opening up the possibilities of the medium to new directions and intersections, towards sculpture, for example. In 2011, Puklus was resident artist in the Banská St a nica cultural centre in Banská Štiavnica and the result of his stay was a book published in 2012 in a limited edition entitled “Handbook to the Stars” which met with tremendous success. In the installation Statue of a Left-handed Soldier (2013) for the Krokus Gallery, he focused even more on overlapping media. His complex work lies somewhere on the borderline of sculpture, installation, photography and film. In this work, nothing is as it seems: on a thousand-odd photocopies of black and white photographs piled on top of each other, a model in a classicist pose holds a javelin and a shield, and she is depicted from eight angles. In the exhibition space, only the props of the image appear without the model, and the material of which they are made and their surface have also been modified. The exhibited work is in fact one of the phases of the development of the original work; the photographic series in the installation change and as the viewers pick up the photocopies, while a hidden animation starts in which the model turns around on the pedestal.
Pavla Sceranková is presenting three small pieces in this exhibition. The basis of these are found objects, porcelain statuettes which are mainly used to decorate homes. One of the main starting points of Sceranková’s artistic strategy is the use of the environment of objects typical for a particular period. Her work is the result of surreally manipulated encounters between collective memory and personal history. By transforming our joint past, Sceranková creates a kind of archival work. With these acts she brings objects originating from the private sphere, yet mass-produced, into the present, thus she is expanding the grey zone of history and preserving the atmosphere of an era, which has just recently passed.
Text by Zita Sárvári, curator of the exhibiton
The exhibition is realized in collaboration with Ballasi Institute Bratislava.
Mihut Boscu Kafchin (*1986 in Cluj-Napoca, RO), graduate of University of Art & Design Cluj-Napoca, finalist of Walter Koschatzky Art Award 2011. He lives and works in Cluj-Napoca. Selected exhibitions: Palais de Tokyo Paris (2012), Műcsarnok Budapest (2012), Sabot Cluj-Napoca (2011), MUMOK Vienna (2011).
Péter Puklus (*1980 in Cluj-Napoca, RO), graduate of MOME in Budapest, shortlisted in the Plat(t)form 2013 at Fotomuseum Winterthur and in the Sony Word Photography Awards 2009. He lives and works in Budapest. Selected exhibitions: FOAM Amsterdam (2013), Trapéz Budapest (2012), 4. FotoBook Festival Kassel (2011), Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2010).
Pavla Sceranková (*1980 in Košice, SK), graduate of the AVU in Prague, stipendiary of the DAAD at the UDK in Berlin (Prof. Tony Cragg), finalist of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2007 and Oskár Čepan Award 2010. She lives and works in Prague. Selected exhibitions: City Gallery Prague (2013), National Gallery Prague (2012), Drdova Gallery Prague (2012), Trafo Gallery Budapest (2011).
For more information about the exhibition, please contact the gallery office@krokusgaleria.sk
