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RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST

Daniela Baráčková, Mark Ther, Petra Malá, Tereza Velíková

Reconstruction of the past is composed of three video pieces and one series of photographs, which relativise the experience of the past and examine the traces of a passed moment. The four artists, in their unique style, make contact with memories and, as a constructional element of their work, use a narrative whose subject relates to personal themes. The video pieces comprise the work of Daniela Baráčková (Tramp, 2006), Mark Ther (Ruhe, im Stalle Furtzt die Kuh, 2007) and Tereza Velíková (True story, 2003), and the series of photographs is exhibited by Petra Malá (A ona řekla dyť se dívá), 2008).

The digital recording of video is by its nature uncertain and virtual, similar to the description of experience using words and stories, and in relation to the interpretation of what has happened allows more layered connotations. The ungrounded nature of contemporary existence and chameleon-like qualities of the description of historical events is one of the syndromes of a fluid society. Virtual worlds appear and their intervention into reality changes patterns of behaviour and modes of thought. Each of the presented artists represents a particular method of perception of story-telling and sharing.

Daniela Baráčková uses apparently simple actions or performances, with of course many references between the lines. Her work is based on the distillation of specific situations from private and public life that have a general overlap. It is compact even despite the richness of the expressive means. The unifying feature is the overlapping of the environment that is closest to the artist with generalised themes and the creation of her own peculiar reality. The urgency of Baráčková’s message in her art often confronts formal stiffness or awkwardness. The Tramp video piece is a static spoken-word image, in which the artist herself stands in the forest at the place where the narrative, about which she talks in bare sentences, took place. She switches between Czech and English. This video questions the portability of experiences allowed by the use of words by depicting an empty space filled with memories.

Mark Ther uses the language of film in his videos. His work is planned and deliberate to the last detail. His work Ruhe, im Stalle furtzt die Kuh (Silence, a cow is farting in the shed) links themes of Nazism and homosexuality. The aristocratic environment of the Třebešice chateau and its gardens evokes classicist images and the sovereign grandeur of the style, which however the internal plot, which takes place here, as well as the signs of shabbiness, overgrowth and decline negate. We also see here a connection to romanticism, with its disunited heroes and amazing scenery. Ther briefly indicates the characters of the three protagonists: feelings of uniqueness co-exist with calculation and manoeuvring on a knife edge. The Atmosphere is pervaded by fear and heaviness, even though in this work the viewer will barely find anything definitive nor, conversely, anything absolutely ambiguous. Death here is a similarly (un)important moment to the hidden desires of a Nazi officer. The postmodern tendency to recycle archival records is relatively strong. Particularly favoured are the records of the secret police, or reports about how Nazi soldiers spent their free time. Mark Ther has however broken free of literal work with tangible materials; his story links artistic fiction and historical facts; the threshold of truth is hazy, as is the impalpability of precise historical records.

Petra Malá’s work deals with the imaginary world of personal memory and recollections. In A ona řekla, dyť se dívá (And she said, ‘but she’s looking’), the pasts of three generations – the artist’s, her mother’s and her great-grandmother’s – change imperceptibly. We trust the authenticity of photographs, even though they exist between reality and fiction. Malá reconstructs the subjective viewing of events, and the viewer is drawn into the captivating world of dreams. The one grounded point, which actually exists, is the environment of the house of her great-grandparents, where her whole family grew up. Other situations, views and expressions whirl by beyond the boundary of descriptive documentation of family history. Similar to Kusturica’s Arizona Dream each character in Petra Malá’s photography has their dreams and desires… and somewhere behind it all is the ubiquitous suggestion of transience and death.

Tereza Velíková has used a montage of advertising spots, hence actually an illusion from an illusive world, in the creation of a new story. In several minutes she reveals the “real fate” of women and men, universal prototypes created by marketing experts. The technical images are a reproduction of reality, copies that we mistake for the original. The character of the video True story is that of absolute non-reality, which of course intrudes into our lives daily. The impression of a hand on paper is not the same image as a video describing the same reality, although the direct likeness seemingly corresponds. In her work, Velíková reacts to the ambivalent nature of today’s life, to the chain of fictitious images of reality created by people for each other.

– Markéta Kubačáková