Subjective Female Documentalists

 

The Subjective Female Documentalists exhibition comprises works by three women artists from Central Europe: Krisztina Erdei from Hungary, Eva Kotátková from the Czech Republic and Lucia Nimcová from Slovakia. All three countries belonged to the Eastern Bloc, all underwent the political system transformation in a similar fashion and at the same time, and their current political and economic situations are very much alike.

 

Political changes that occurred in this region after 1989 brought about a revolution not only at the economic and cultural level, but also the visual one. A dull and cheerless world suddenly grew multicoloured, bright… as well as plastic, kitschy, tacky. The market was deluged with all kinds of cheap goods, projecting an unbalanced, garish, uncontrolled picture. Visual order has gradually been imposed in large cities, but a trip to the provinces of the former Eastern Bloc discloses that the revolution is still going on. Many visual artists derived inspiration from it. Photography was a medium that benefited the most. The subject matter was there, ready to be captured. The change of political system was followed by a decade of globalization and the expanse of free market, as well as a new era in the history of photography. Time-consuming analogue processes that required accurateness and painstakingness were superseded by digital technology. In retrospect, we can talk about a peculiar iconography of that time – photographs of motley markets, makeshift booths brimming with all kinds of commodities, ubiquitous advertising, banners, signs, gaudy plastic bags, men wearing white socks with flip-flops became icons of the liberty of digital aesthetics.

 

The artists featured at this exhibition use the same medium – photography, they come from the same region and belong to the same generation. Typical of people from this generation, born at the turn of the 1970s and 80s, who grew up after the transformation and never really experienced the lack of goods (as they parents had), is a sense of nostalgia for objects, shops and design of the 1980s. The work by Erdei, Kotátkova and Nimcová is a subjective record documenting the world from the perspective of one generation. Each of these artists explores themes from their immediate surroundings. All three refer to the past, both in social and political terms as well as personal –affected by individual experience, nostalgia for the childhood and the place of growing up. What they have in common is thus the area of interest, while their ways of seeing and recording situations, places and people are individual and unique for each of them. Some of the pieces depict everyday lives (which were alike in all post-socialist states in the first decade of the twenty-first century), others directly refer to places and people close to the artists. These often include reconstructions of childhood events presented in a new context, or working with archival materials (photographs, films). Their observations are witty and captured with a fair dose of sense of humour, saturated with incredible creative intuition.

 

Krisztina Erdeipresent’s eight photographs with a common title – Floating. They mostly come from the series Formalities and Antiglamour or Everyday Exclusion, executed in post-socialist states (Ukraine, Lithuania, Kosovo, Hungary) at the beginning of the 21st century.

 

Erdei’s works tend to center on people’s endeavours to accommodate themselves, to conform to norms and yield to established social patterns imposed on them by those around them.

 

Having to accommodate is a common necessity in our everyday lives; it cannot be avoided but it may be unsuccessful. The artist stresses that our actions and reactions are neither free nor independent because of those mechanisms. In her photographs, she transforms these scenarios, reviews and thus questions them. Erdei’s photographs seem to be random, pointless and ‘chaotic’ compositions, hastily captured. These are mostly events that tend to go unnoticed and it is only when we see them in a picture that they appear somehow familiar to us.

 

In Erdei’s works, there is also the theme of specific beauty, attraction in an unorthodox sense. Boredom, lack of provocation, monotony – these are the themes of the Antiglamour cycle. For many years, the artist has been working as a graphic designer, also in lifestyle magazines.

 

When working on the Antiglamour series, she said: “In the past two years I have thought about pictures only as a picture editor. Editors spend a great deal of time picking out the best photos from a set or from a huge archive to illustrate a story or article. The series Antiglamour tells of this period. As these pictures are illustrations to a non-existent text, they do not need to conform to anything.” 

 

Eva Kotátková’s photographs presented at the Subjective Female Documentalists exhibition come from two cycles: House Arrest and Controlled Memory Loss, which comprised drawings, photographs, objects and performative actions. The departure point for these works was provided by the artist’s closest surroundings, family, home and school with all their mechanisms, rites and systems of interdependencies. Art provided the artist with a tool for exploring these areas, for presenting them in a new context and verifying her stance towards them. At the time, Kotátková focused on the creative process and its language. She was inspired by everyday stories and situations which she revalued, transformed, placed within new coordinates, referring them to personal experience and her own biography. The artist analyzed simple activities, making their performance difficult and extremely stretching the time of doing them. In this way, she put her own physical abilities, flexibility and endurance to a test, wishing to experience some situations as well as spatial and personal relations. She did not strive towards the unity of form or style. Drawings, photographs, objects and actions constituted reciprocal interpretation and complementation.

 

In her work, Lucia Nimcová keeps returning to events and places from the past. Many of her pieces are related to where she was born – the town of Humenné in the north of Slovakia. Nimcová works with memory, she brings places and people back to life, reconstructs events and situations setting them in a new context. For her, the medium of photography is a documentary tool which has become a new disclosed world to her, and she employs various strategies to achieve different results. The photographs exhibited at Arsenal come from the Animal Imago series, originally published in the form of a book. This is the first time they have been displayed in a gallery. The Sports Day video, on the other hand, is a record of a sports day organized by the community of Humenné. It is an amiable and amusing story, shown as it were in a distorting mirror, in which the artist evokes places and people from the past (her childhood), suggesting that loyalty is an integrating factor, most relevant also to herself.

 

Agata Chinowska

 

 

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