JIŘÍ KOVANDA – XXX

Jiri Kovanda – xxx
curator: Michal Kolecek
12.10.—8.11.2012

Galeria Arsenał, ul. Adama Mickiewicza 2, 15-222 Białystok, Poland, www.galeria-arsenal.pl
in cooperation with Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, www.fud.ujep.cz

Jiri Kovanda (born 1953 in Prague) belongs to the best-known contemporary Czech artists whose works are presented in the context of the most imporant international exhibitons like Documenta Kassel (2007) or Sao Paolo Biennial (2012). Jiri Kovanda´s oeuvre – consisting especially of actions, installations and interventions, but also paintings (created especially during 1980´s and 1990´s) – has been in such way well received on the international scene and represents the noticeable and respected position of late modernistic conceptual art related to the reflection of totalitarian and posttotalitarian Central European society.

Since Kovanda´s early productions, dating back to the end of the 1970´s, his action art projects and installations realized mostly at public space are documented with original black and white photographs, later color photographs, in which the performer contrasts with his concerted effort to overcome (his own) social limits. The photographs were often accompanied by sheets of office paper covered with descriptive sentences written on a typewriter, which postulate the main motives and the methods of realisation of the performance. The distance of almost forty years since the realisation of the first, yet fresh art works can intimate a degree of suggestive nostalgia to the contemporary audience, as happens in today´s era of developed information technologies with the black and white analogue process and with the phenomenon of the typewriter – the best friend  of all intellectuals of the 20th century. The small format of the photographs in combination with typewritten messages organised into minimalist blocks, becomes Kovanda´s „trademark“ and ideal strategy of accented conceptual expression.

After phenomenal success which the author enjoyed in the last decades, he decided on another, quite radical step. At the prestigious space of the Tate Modern in London (2007) he presented two performances (Kissing through Glass; On the Escalator) and documented them on video.  Beside his digital video recordings, Kovanda works in recent years with new minimal situations or monumental, complexed intallations. The first ones follow on his previous projects from the 1980´s (Salty Corner, Sweet Arch; Tower Made of Sugar, etc. ). Recently he documents his participatory interventions on digital prints and reveals some incredible co-occurrences to the viewer, which are always there but usually go unnoticed. In this way, for example,  the programmed expansion of a tiny pea creates a visual micro-story, which for the artist becomes a symbol of the function of an atomised unit.

Beside the set of photographs which document Kovanda´s actions and interventions at public or gallery space the artist will prepare and present a new site-specific project dedicated to Arsenal Gallery Bialystok.

Jiri Kovanda has placed himself among the legends of contemporary Central European visual culture while he preserved his unique ability to comment on – with a sense of gentle humour –  our social and emotional cognizance (or the lack of it).

Michal Kolecek
 

in cooperation with: