'one hikes the trail with her dog Cooper', an accompanying program of Bára Čápová's exhibition 'INKA' by Vaida Stepanovaitė in gallery Altán Klamovka, Prague

October 16, 2018
Author Echo Gone Wrong

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Bára Čápová: INKA

The opening will take place on October 16, 2018 from 6 pm.

The exhibition will run until November 10, 2018.

Curator of Gallery: Lenka Sýkorová

Accompanying program on November 10, 2018: 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. – animation workshop for children, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. – commented viewing of the exhibition and the exhibition activity of Klamovka Pavilion.

Accompanying program of the opening building upon the previous project actiongalleries.info

Vaida Stepanovaitė: one hikes the trail with her dog Cooper

Building upon the previous stagings of performative events around Europe, the planned spatial research of the city and mostly, Barbora Čápová’s exhibition INKA – an open-ended, loosely formatted performative discussion one hikes the trail with her dog Cooper by Vaida Stepanovaite (Lithuania) is planned to adapt to the exhibition opening.
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Barbora Čápová has a master’s degree from the Performance Studio led by Jiří Kovanda at the Faculty of Art and Design of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem and a bachelor’s degree from the Department of Art, Visual Culture and Textile Studies led by Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková at the Faculty of Education of the University in Hradec Králové. She is currently enrolled in the PhD program at the Faculty of Art and Design of Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem and researches the term “artist–curator” in the development of Czech visual art from 2000 to the present, focusing on the dividing line of this term from the point of view of an artist and a curator. This is why she was invited to present her current artwork in the Altán Klamovka Gallery.

The artist has been working for a long time with memories as one of the most important part of human life. She is fascinated by the way the present is affected by memories and how we treat them in visual culture. Barbora Čápová is interested in the phase of reminiscing for its fragmentariness. Memory layers blend together with the subjective and objective divide of what we experienced and form our current personal and collective identity. The search for a piece of truth is thus subject to the phenomenon of current memory. The artist works with ready-mades that embody the memory of material and use on the background of fetish. Since these are often inherited objects, they are full of personal memory. By using everyday items in visual art, Barbora Čápová articulates the actual aesthetic intent of situations that initiate new memories that are not linked to the original factual evidence of personal history.

The exhibition Inka for the Altán Klamovka Gallery refers to the artist’s memories of her grandma. Fragments of her presence are still alive in the artist and generate many fragmented memories. By connecting these fragments, the artist creates a personal mythologization of the person, whose story she decided to tell, using items that became an essential part of the person’s later years and that were a part of the person’s individuality. The lace that bears witness to many hours of work is presented at the exhibition as a drawing on transparent plastic foils that refers to the material of plastic tablecloths (form) and to personal mythology (content) by demonstrating handcraft and passion for this technique. Through the exhibited objects, the artist draws visitors into the newly created environment showing the mutual world of the granddaughter and the grandma that is in fact universal and can trigger our own personal memories.

Lenka Sýkorová

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more information to Vaida Stepanovaitė: one hikes the trail with her dog Cooper

Delving into the statement of the artist’s fascination by the way the present is affected by memories and how we treat them in visual culture, as well as how fragmented memory defines our current personal and collective identity, Vaida proposes to treat it as a spatializing act. The reference of a hike and a dog named Cooper is borrowed from the thoughts on how leisure is performed and a place is made, proposed by Daniel R. Williams and Joseph G. Champ in a volume Landscapes of Leisure: Space, Place and Identities. The dog is following the peak bagger who is trying to find his way onto the second-to-highest mountain top. Collecting material along the way to share it with the so-called Internet-based community, he thus legitimizes his memory, making a space and a place for himself to affirm his identity. A personal narrative is told, and then retold by others; the personal space is made and then remade into a place of memory.

Hiking the trail denotes the proposed experiential wandering and structuring; especially considering the setting of a public park in the city as a place of leisure, arguably as well as a gallery itself. The curious and yet undefined format of a performative discussion is an inversion of a performative lecture that has become so utilized in the contemporary arts, and also a slight inquiry into a commented viewing that is proposed later in the exhibition by its curator. The collected research material is intended to be translated into a textual documentation after the event.

Vaida Stepanovaitė is a curator of a nomadic project space Kabinetas that operates between Berlin, Lithuania and everywhere. This year in its curatorial cycle Kabinetas is exploring the problematics of Embodied Space sometimes shifting the focus on the ‘unbodied’ or non-human embodiment as an experiential tool for the knowledge production, of the yet unknown. The cycle has gone through various temporal performative-spatial situations: at ex-gas station in Copenhagen, a project space and a public square in Berlin, a cultural institution’s backyard in Kaunas (Lithuania), a Turkish market in Berlin, a daytime rave and internet radio waves in Vilnius (Lithuania), and further going to a train ride between Amsterdam and Maastricht. Usually staying in the footnotes and working off the beaten path with some risky deception in mind, Kabinetas acts as a space in space, gladly without one to call its own. Run by Vaida Stepanovaite and Ruta Stepanovaite with collaborating curators joining frequently.
http://kabinetas.com

The research is kindly supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Gallery Altán Klamovka

Wednesday and Saturday: 1-5 pm
http://www.actiongalleries.info/kontakt.php?l=en