Until ___ Do Us Part / Kým nás ___ nerozdelí 2018, Martina Chudá + Peter Lančarič, Nitra Gallery, Gallery of Youth
Projekt z verejných zdrojov formou štipendia podporil Fond na podporu umenia.
The exhibition has been supported using public funds provided by the Slovak Arts Council.
The first exhibition project by Martina Chudá and Peter Lančarič also becomes a probe sent to explore their personal lives. Besides creating art together, they are also partners in life. Which is why they have decided to respond to this very popular art theme – two people’s personal relationship.
They incorporate many material and formal approaches they have adopted throughout their art careers. She is a textile artist, while he is a photographer. They keep looking for any common grounds and try and expand them: from found object to installation, from photography to video, from document to feature… They use their personal experience to combine intimate with impersonal and even ironical views of their subject matter.
Even the exhibition space itself with its spiral staircase and “material base” in the form of documentary installation offer the visitors an opportunity to look for various levels of explorations and search for answers. However, it does not include any grandiose finale or a universal answer. It all ends in a loop… While this part can be perceived as a move from something specific to something generic, a darkened room with an installation inside of it represents a turn to an intimate experience of a personal tragedy.
The artists are not trying to demythologise this phenomenon. They rather use introspection in order to move towards more generic levels which allow to ask questions about relationships as precisely defined bonds that are set by gender, religious or other social norms. Whether we are actually able to experience eternal love or whether we are trapped in a loop of infantile relationship games. By leaving a word out from a famous clause, they open this ironical game of options, if it actually must be death that do us apart. It might as well be something completely different, even love…
Kým nás ___ nerozdelí (2018)
Kým nás smrť nerozdelí. Táto veta zosobňujúca fatalizmus partnerského puta dala možnosť prežívať predstave lásky, ktorú nezničia príkoria osudu a stala sa námetom mnohých diel od výtvarného cez slovesné po dramatické umenie. Každý snáď zatúžil po niečom takom. Obrazy takéhoto zväzku sa pevne zakorenili v našom kultúrnom kontexte podvedome formujúc naše vnímanie spoločných vzťahov, romantickej lásky a s tým spojených klišé, do ktorých vyústili.
Pretože autori Martina Chudá a Peter Lančarič sú okrem partnerov umeleckých aj partnermi v osobnom živote, rozhodli sa na túto tému, prirodzene, reagovať. Využívajú rozličné formálne a materiálne prístupy vychádzajúce z ich tvorivého zamerania: ona – textilná výtvarníčka; on – fotograf. Prechádzajú skrz médiá od nájdeného objektu k inštalácii, od fotografii k videu, až po performance priamo na vernisáži. Hľadajú medzi nimi prieniky nielen kreatívne, ale aj osobné. Posúvajú ich z roviny strohej dokumentačnej a esteticky chladnej k fabulatívnej a ironickej, až po veľmi intímnu, predstavujúcu osobnú výpoveď odrážajúcu tragickú skúsenosť.
Koncepcia sa opiera aj o samotný charakter výstavného priestoru, ktorý je formovaný špirálou schodiska s odpočívadlami a miestnosťou bokom od tejto štruktúry. Do tohto tvaru nabádajúceho k stúpaniu, a tak možnému objasneniu či zavŕšeniu témy, autori inštalujú diela odrážajúce rozličné roviny vnímania vzťahu. V širšom rámci vytvárajú fiktívny príbeh jednej lásky – od darčekov cez postupné zbližovanie sa k pokusom o romantickú tvorbu až cez sexuálnu skúsenosť a následné partnerské mocenské hry spojené s infantilnými prejavmi udobrovania prostredníctvom konzumných banalít a materialistického fetišizovania.
V tejto rozsiahlej a mnohovrstevnej expozícii autori ponúkajú divákovi rozličné interpretácie vnímania vzťahov. Nie v rovine zažitých klišé, ale naopak, prostredníctvom ironického nadhľadu otvárajú otázky týkajúce sa vzájomných mocenských ambícií, rodových úloh a spoločného prežívania hraničných situácií, pred ktoré môžeme byť/sme postavení. Preto zámerne vynechávajú smrť zo známej sentencie, aby tak otvorili priestor pre uvažovanie, a donútili nás zamyslieť sa, že či práve takéto uvažovanie musí byť jediným dôvodom. Či nás nakoniec nemusí rozdeliť niečo úplne iné – život, majetok, práca alebo aj samotná láska…
Until ___ Do Us Part (2018)
„Exhibiting Artists: Martina Chudá, Peter Lančarič
Curator: Peter Molari
Entering the exhibition space, we are confronted with its architecture. Grasping this place, in which the staircase with its shoulders and landings is rising, has provided an opportunity to create an exposition on the border of the fictitious and the real. A story of a further unspecified relationship, in which the authors, through (often personal) various artifacts and media, play only the roles of anonymous protagonists. Right at the beginning, it is the installation Footprints, approached in an almost archiving or documentary way, where the author has precisely arranged selected items made by the partners as gifts. Their value, therefore, does not lie in their functional, but in the symbolic meaning. However, it removes their suggested intimate character. By the aesthetics of almost a police evidence, it makes them into a corpus delicti fragments from a shared life. Something close is reduced to its material fundament, measurable, weighable, and precisely sorted as anything else. However, at the same time, preserved in this way, they get to a presumable protection zone as material evidence, a record of our behavior… Moving further up the stairs, the exposition continues with a series of photographs from the author’s cycle Turn off the lights. In the form of diary recordings of different places (both exterior and interior) and fragmentation of a body appearing in some of the shots, it creates a mosaic of a subjective moody scenery. It opens up a plot continuing up the stairs… Ascending further up, photography changes into a video projection and the staircase into an auditorium. Here, the percipient can watch The Status about Love. Statements of fourteen participants reading texts from phones are a modern paraphrase of love letters. The sound of the video is spreading through the whole space, but it seems as if the statements did not correspond to what is being declared. The austerity and disengagement of the delivery offer almost a cynical view of romantic communication in a contemporary world with its technological progress. The desire to be always connected and to react often changes the character of such a contact into a brief disinterested transfer of information… In the following work X+Y=BL, we can see partners’ physical experience with paraphrasing of folk artwork. Through an ordinary material – a bed sheet with a hypothetical memento of an intercourse, the author creates a scene of a place of the crime. This is accentuated by a selvage, referring to an “embroidered handkerchief” which girls in the past used to give to their loved ones as a sign of affection. From the gifts on the ground floor and the moody photographs, here, we are getting to something much more physical. This connection is further enhanced by a video projection referring to the title of the exhibition. In the projection, the authors’ bodies are moving towards each other on the wall of a cemetery, where the symbol of a cross looks like a plus sign. Here, the sexual intercourse becomes a seal confirming a fated love… Therefore, their mutual work – a devotional with a motive of the sacred heart of Jesus, displayed nearby, appears provocative. Within this context, it is possible to find connections with sin and salvation, sacrifice, or an ecstasy, but also with religious dogmas related to physical love. Illuminated vitrines, through a clear title – Trophy I and II and through the execution of the topic, show the dark, but somehow always present, side of a relationship as a power struggle. Their cold aesthetics evoking classical art of the ancient world or the pureness of Ingres’s nude paintings is in opposition to the other pair, where the bodies are placed in a countryside as if washed to the shore by the current. This confrontation shows how delusive these victories can be and that, at the end of a fight, we can lose a lot… At the end of the staircase, we get to a video projection Plush, where the authors almost ironically let us know that no grand finale is about to happen. Instead of an expected conclusion, as it often happens with a fated love, we find ourselves in an infantile vicious circle. The authors, dressed in plush costumes, hug themselves and walk at regular intervals. This process has an exact rhythm, referring by its structure to classical drama, and by the repetition to number twelve. They draw from popular cultural contexts and symbolism, with a purpose to point out, through irony, to an often immature romantic relationship as a series of break-ups and make-ups. The costumes refer to a cliché paraphrasing an image of plush toys that partners use to give to each other as gifts. This way, they are emphasizing the childishness of such relationship games, materialized through kitsch consumer objects. Simultaneously, they encourage the visitor to descend back down, return to the beginning of the whole story stuck in an infinite loop… The authors also wear plush costumes at the opening of the exhibition. They stand opposing each other in the door frame, citing a well-known performance by Marina Abramović and Ulaya, creating another game of contexts connected to a partnership in an artistic work. While the spiral of the staircase offers a view that is anonymous and de facto universalizing, in the case of the room situated sideways, it is the other way around… With its dark atmosphere and displayed objects, it articulates going through a personal drama connected to a traumatic experience of losing a child. Each author applies their own formal approach reflecting their individual perception of this critical situation. The author Martina Chudá uses a clear symbolism of the selected objects – a skeleton of a mattress as a metaphor of a shared bed and conception, joint together by textile objects evoking limbs and umbilical cord opening up into a mound of soil as a symbol of both life and the last resting place. Peter Lančarič complements this scene by a photographic series of the same title Silence adjusted in backlit frames. The shots from different environments – hospital room, room in a shared flat, or partner’s clothes marked by a spontaneous lactation, have a gloomy touch of silent pain. The sound of a children toy announcing “I love you” by the entrance is no longer an implication of adults giving each other childishly appearing gifts. Its interpretation is much more disquieting. The scene thus becomes a crypt, a dark corner of one’s own mind, where the memory of this event has settled forever. In this way, the authors show us that instead of a utopian search for a meaningless ideal, it would be good to think about what our relationships are made of. Whether we really are not just prisoners of learnt stereotypes related to not only gender, sex and connected hierarchical structures, culture, or religion. Is there a possibility to break out of this vicious cycle, and if there is, then how? In the end, there might be more things that could divide us than we are willing to acknowledge, even without a sentimental fatalism…
Kým nás ___ nerozdelí (2018)
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