Eva Kotatkova and Dominik Lang
Wasteland
7 February–14 April 2014
Project Arts Centre
39 East Essex Street
Temple Bar, Dublin
Ireland
Hours: Monday–Saturday 11am–8pm
Admission free
www.projectartscentre.ie
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Eva Kotatkova and Dominik Lang are both fascinated by the institutional characteristics of the various systems that shape and structure our lives. At Project Arts Centre, the two Czech artists have collaborated for the first time: Wasteland is an installation that suggests at once a storage yard, a ghost estate, or a place for discarded ideas and methodologies: a place where natural, found and sculpted objects are wrapped as though for shipping, or prepared for post, but with an absurd attention to form and detail. Wasteland is filled with ‘humble objects’ (Lang), ‘institutional rules’ (Kotatkova), structures, fencing, geometric forms, phantoms, imagined items and salvaged things. Through a series of letters, we formulate an idea of a park in transit, detailed down to an abandoned book left on a bench, the wrecked metal bars of a fence and the particularly challenging logistics of transporting a puddle. This is a peculiar proposition for institutional transformation.
Eva Kotatkova‘s daily drawing practice involves cutting, collaging, splicing and marking. Her installations and sculptures are underpinned by similar processes, where objects and subject matter are found, fabricated, captured or suggested. Her work is stimulated by the practices and accumulated evidence from institutions of psychiatry, education and indeed theatre, and infused with the psychological and physical effects of restraint, moulding and manipulation.
Dominik Lang has located many of his previous works in the architecture, infrastructure or politics of the art world as social institution. The alteration or ‘correction’ of aspects of architecture (the level of the floor, positioning of a staircase or function of certain museum rooms) are areas he has sought to adjust. From the troves of Czech history of art to the overflowing shelves of his family home, the life and exploration of historical objects repeatedly surface throughout his practice, and the way in which these histories are accessed, understood, and abstracted are an enduring field of interest.
Wasteland has been accompanied by Theatre of Speaking Objects by Eva Kotatkova, installed in one of Project Arts Centre’s two performance spaces. Theatre of Speaking Objects knits together extraordinary, poignant and personal accounts of complex relationships with language. Eva Kotatkova has gathered stories and remembrances from around the world, and located them within a cast of used objects and therapeutic props, things that are used to speak for the subjects—subjects who sometimes cannot speak for themselves—becoming mediators and containers for human voices and personal stories. The stories range from an account of two brothers who communicate only in the third person, to an individual who compulsively rehearses daily conversations, to another who seems trapped in an extensive list of fears. Cumulatively, these voices reflect upon social exclusion and isolation, at the same time giving life back to objects that are mute.
Curated by Tessa Giblin, with thanks to David Upton, Assistant Curator of Visual Arts, and produced with the support of a Production Residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Eva Kotatkova has exhibited in the recent international exhibitions of Venice Biennale (2013), Moscow Biennale (2013), Sydney Biennale (2012) and Lyon Biennale (2011), as well as making solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2013, amongst others. She studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Prague Academy of Applied Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and Akademie Bildende Kunst Wien from 2002 to 2007. In 2007 she became the youngest artist ever to be awarded the Jindrich Chalupecky Award for young artists in the Czech Republic.
Dominik Lang exhibited in La Triennale (2012), and has presented recent solo exhibitions in Secession, Vienna (2013), Kunsthaus Dresden (2012), and in the Pavilion of the Czech Republic at the 54th Venice Biennale (2010). He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2008, while taking one year during his studies at Cooper Union in New York and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. Currently he is head of the sculpture studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, together with Edith Jerabkova, and in 2013 he was also awarded the Jindrich Chalupecky Award for young artists.
Project Arts Centre is core funded by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
