Facebook eMailing Urban Espresso Bar

A MONUMENT OF COERCION

30.09.2013 - 13.10.2013

JIRÍ SKÁLA : A MONUMENT OF COERCION : 2010

Skála is a Czech artist who is known for his playful conceptualist approach to various social contexts and situations. He often employs participants in game-like interactions in his work, or institutes subtle interventions creating objects that have only been minimally altered but which are no less effective in changing our own perspectives of the given situation.

Ever since I was little I was fascinated by stories in which the plots were set inside the Arctic Circle. I liked the idea of endless white expanses that evoked feelings of emptiness and of being lost. When I started to get interested in art, I’d always take a liking to the kind of artists who made me feel the feelings like in those adventure stories that took place in the polar tundra. Like for example the empty spaces of ?estmír Kafka, the minimalist word games of Ji?í Valoch, and so on. I tried to do the same in my own work when I started out as an artist.
As I became financially independent and generally self-reliant, another emptiness revealed itself which was different from that affectedly aesthetic emptiness, an emotional emptiness that had nothing to do with my previous activities. That made me start thinking about where I’d gone wrong. All my boyhood and adolescence, I had blocked out anything that tied me to my parents’ working class status. So that boundless white expanse was just a rendering of the longing that I wanted to make a reality.

Jirí Skála “Demarcation”, Autobiographies, tranzit.cz Prague 2006, p. 1990.

 
Sub Urban Video Lounge is supported by Municipal Services for Arts and Culture, City of Rotterdam, Stichting Bevordering Volkskracht, Budelinc and Urban Espresso Bar.
Facebook eMailing Urban Espresso Bar