MEETFACTORY (KOSTKA GALLERY), PRAGUE (CZ)
The exhibition stems from the fourth collaboration of Tereza Fišerová and Evžen Šimera, who, once again, inquire in the means of presenting an artwork and its relation to the viewer.
An object - artifact is mediated to the beholders through an image and voice, instead of its actual physical presence. However, the documentary-like commentary returns plasticity to the two-dimensional depiction of an originally three-dimensional work. The reduction of the senses and shift in their usage leads to achieving an elementary notion of space in the human perception.
The most appropriate text accompanying this exhibition would probably be one that I would never write. A new wave of criticism (often most justified) is building against curator’s texts anyway, calling them “mere rubbish” and in this case an installation, which necessarily does not require any text at all, invites such an approach. The exhibition of Tereza Fišerová and Evžen Šimera describes, in picture and sound, an object that is not present. Should the curator then side with the artists and in her text also describe the missing statue that however constitutes the central theme of the exhibition, or step aside and try to handle the fact that the artists themselves describe this absence? Or should she keep silent rather, take up a viewer’s stand and simply apprehend the situation?
The Šimera / Fišerová exhibition is largely about absence and excess. The authors created an object that somehow embodies the nosey bent and “searchall” character of contemporary art. There is something banal to it, something magical, something linear, something amorphous, something deep, something superficial. Nevertheless, the resultant statue’s presence in the gallery is only through visual and verbal points of view, provided, on the one hand, by a video rendering the searching movement of the camera eye, and, on the other hand, a conversation about the statue, in which three women’s voices engage. Neither these women are present here though, being represented by simple objects – symbols of the basic possibilities of how one can understand space: height, width and length. These values are metaphorically translated into the ways the statue is interpreted, pragmatically or rationally, but also in poetic or dreamy visions. Thus in an otherwise empty gallery we find, apart from a few physical elements that rather form the installation’s skeleton, only these pictorial and spoken explanations. As soon as the viewer enters, there is something in excess. It is the visitors’ fundamental freedom not just to look and listen, but also to form their own opinion, interpretation. Now, however, the artists are ridding them of it. The visitors cannot simply view the statue and see something in it, think something about it. Their freedom is somehow redundant here. What’s left to them? They can, in spite of that, tune into the situation, grasp the missing object from the angles presented to them. Materialize it with the help of spatial sound and two-dimensional depiction, yet only through the prism of someone or something else, or, they can step aside and think how often, in other situations, they quite uncritically accept information mediated to them (be in in a pleasant or unpleasant form), not being able to get access to its source or essence, and when, quite on the contrary, they can step out of the media circle and look at it from the outside. They will not learn much more about the statue itself or the core of the matter from this new angle of view. However, they have a chance to discover the mechanism by which this phantom was created, and ponder if something was missing in it or redundant.
Or, rather keep silent.
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Tereza Fišerová (*1988) graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She performed her foreign studies at École supérieure d’art et design Marseille-Méditerranée in Marseille, France. Her mostly spatial work, which she often combines with sound, video or performance, is based on an interaction with the viewer or physical or emotional body of the artist herself. She works with the possibilities of human perception, preventing the traditional ways of reading and interpreting the artwork, to leave room for some new ones. Tereza presented her work at both solo and group exhibitions mainly in independent art galleries and art centers in Prague, Brno and Pilsen. She was the finalist of the Start Point Prize in 2013.
Evžen Šimera (*1980) became publicly known especially for his “runny” linear paintings. However, his work covers much a wider range. Referring to the aesthetics and principles of minimalism, Šimera is interested above all in the material itself and its properties, but also in its performing character, in the potential of simple forms to enter the artist-orchestrated situations, emerging quite organically or fulfilling premeditated patterns. Šimera graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He was represented at prominent exhibitions mainly in the Czech Republic. He was finalist of Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2008, and received the Critics’ Award for Young Painting in 2009.
