Intervals

Kateřina Závodová's exhibition project is built on stories. As soon as the viewer enters the exhibition, he or she becomes both their scriptwriter and actor. The key and beginning of the suggested stories is a calendar with the names of missing persons, where almost every day of the year is associated with a portrait and name of a disappeared person. The author imagines life destinies after their disappearance, opens and depicts possible outcomes and events. Short stories - video-studies then refer to themes such as hope, fall, liberation, getting lost in time and space and imprisonment in time. The theme of missing persons has a dramatic, emotional and tragic subtext, but the author presents it sensitively and without pathos.

An important element of the exhibition is the question of the relationship between time and space, which is also related to the title of the exhibition. Time is an abstract quantity, difficult to grasp with our senses, but it plays a fundamental role in human stories. The exhibited electronic object, measuring the rhythm of time, presents an oppressive awareness of the fact of the passage of time, which is unidirectional and linear, but also backward, when we perceive time as past. At the same time, it is a metaphor for the danger of getting stuck in a time loop. The dimension of space is defined by regularly spaced points on the floor in the interior and exterior of the gallery. The presence of signs in space in this case is an awareness of absence, the absence of the people being sought.

Kateřina Závodová works with impressive and strong visual metaphors, her works are carried by a delicate and sensitive poetics. She created videos of a similar style for her diploma thesis, where we watched dream-like video stories in six projections: a woman in an aquarium located in the interior of a room, a couple sitting under a swinging bell in a tower..." The author plays with narrative and constructs an emotional story based on visual symbols and hints.

The Intervals exhibition is the result of a creative scholarship from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

Curator and author of the text: Lenka Kukurová

Intervals – Gallery Školská 28, communication space, Prague

November 9, 2010 – December 9, 2010
Curator: Lenka Kukurová