Krokus Gallery in collaboration with festival Anasoft Litera presents a group exhibition titled “some of my stories I know, some of them I listen to. some of them I hear.”
The exhibition with the title borrowed from the work of Milan Adamčiak is freely inspired by the relationship of literature and visual art. Visual artists are also narrators, but they communicate their stories differently from people of letters. Contemporary art offers the creators a wide register of both formal and semantic signs to build their story. The range of presented artworks follows various narrative approaches: they work with text, image or sound. The exhibits are based on biographical experiences, fictional literary events or remnants of collective historical narratives. As artist Ľubomír Ďurček comments: “Life consists of tales.” However, we do not deal here with works with a clear script or plot. The artists included in the exhibition use poetical structures as metaphors, non-conventional play on words and they share a liking for mystification or playful fabulation, manipulation of the found image and text with the purpose of making something “third”. At the same time, the exhibits bear a certain “aesthetics of ineffable” (or something not fully said) that gives the viewers a sufficient room for their own interpretation and dialogue.
Language, writing and text are inspiring sources for visual artists not only semantically, but also formally. As Dezider Tóth (alias Monogramista T.D.) in his text titled Oslovenie – Salutation (2006) writes: “I am in trance when I see a fragment of deconstructed writing on a facade, or insufficiently lit neon writing. Sometimes a sight of letter will make me stiff for long minutes. I giggle as if I were in front of a mute face of Buster Keaton. If I ever had a mystical experience, it was in front of a letter.” Tóth’s artistic programme commits to poetic figures; his hand-painted textual images prove the artist’s skilfulness and visual imagination on the one hand and on the other hand, they can be read as micro-poems, well-taken bon mots or aphorisms. Despite not declaring his works outspokenly political, both of his for the first time exhibited pictures (from the late 1970s and early 1980s) carry – apart from specific artistic poetics – also an ironic reflection of ideology of visual culture of the normalisation era.
The contemporary context may be found in the works of Svätopluk Mikyta who presents an intervention into the found ready-made object – the Workers’ Day banner installed onto a building facade. Mikyta confronts the obligatory socialist enthusiasm packed into a banal slogan with an iconic sign of the capitalist consumerist society – with the logo of the most famous fast-food chain. Not only does he unite the two ideologies in one picture, his intervention also embodies a story of memory of his generation who experienced the social transformation at their coming of age. In the gallery premises, Mikyta presents a selection of his diary drawings, where he freely varies the elements of visual poetry, calligraphy and folklore symbolism.
As for Milan Adamčiak, the gallery brings a selection of his experimental poetry from the turn of 1960s and 1970s. The musicologist, actionist and conceptual artist perceives text as an open field and emphasises an active performative activity of a viewer/reader who is free to finish his texts. Apart from a semantic textual decomposition, Adamčiak consciously works with a creative form of typewriting signs and punctuation marks, fully developing it in his visual poetry.
Ľubomír Ďurček’s performative art treats the body as a communication medium. As early as the late 1970s, Ďurček forms a system of elementary poses, something like a body alphabet, which he adopts to stylise into a live sculpture in the found reality and brings attention to its cultural significance; he transforms it, comments on it or delimits from it. The visual information has a processual character and within the exhibition it may have a narrative potential whose fulfilment always depends on a temporal and spatial context. The cycle Slovenské povesti a báje – Slovak Tales and Myths (1987 – 1989) originated during the summer school of amateur visual artists organised by Ďurček together with Július Koller and Květa Fulierová. Photographically captured motion experiments in the found environment combined with the title of the artwork referring to a non-existing literary source become a live material for one’s own fabulation of a story.
In Katarína Poliačiková’s work Inde – Elsewhere (2015), visual material blends with a literary text. Three photos of an unknown man (most probably film shots), standing rigidly in three different environments, were linked with an excerpt of W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. By creating a relationship between the literary fiction and photography, the author liberated the narrative potential of already existing artworks to create new associations of the story of the man in the picture.
The point of departure for Peter Barényi’s site-specific installation are his childhood memories. In the gallery space, the artist reconstructed the sound background of a fierce wind he would listen to as a child. The strident intensity of the sound recalling howl stifled all the other sounds in the household, thus changing his bedroom as a safe haven into an insecure environment. The artist enables the viewers to become a part of the artwork and perceive their own associations linked to the acoustic experience.
Curator: Gabriela Kisová
Assistant Curator: Mária Janušová
The exhibition was realised in collaboration with the festival of contemporary Slovak literature Anasoft Litera Fest 2015.
niektoré moje príbehy poznám. niektoré počúvam. niektoré vidím._dokumentácia výstavy_Krokus 2015