Jana Želibská
(1941 Olomouc)
An intermedia artist, her oeuvre ranges from environments, installations, video art,
and objects, to painting and graphics; she lives in Bratislava
Dominika Horáková
(1974 Bratislava)
Her main interest is photography; she lives in Bratislava
NEBUĎLABUŤ / DON´T BE NAIVE
The cooperative project of Jana Želibská and Dominika Horáková titled Nebuďlabuť (Don't be Naïve) is a creative intercourse of two mature artists.Their common feature is a similar kind of ironical detachment by which each one expresses their views on serious subjects rather light-heartedly, uninhibitedly, wittily and as if en passant, using their own medium and visual language. The exhibition exploits the juxtaposition of the pathos addressing the viewers' emotions (in currently historicising art of installation) with banality as a sensitivity characteristic for the modernity and contemporaneity (in photography). Banal, vernacular, domestic and anti-heroic stands here against rigid, romantic and heroic. Želibská's video art installation links by its syntax with the art works from nineties such as Last Feeding (1992) or Impaired Watering(1991).The hens were substituted with more grandiose swans although ameliorated, illuminated, 'beautiful'. The grotesque last supper was replaced by the swan song – at the background of the monumental landscape with surprising sights. Since sixties realised that the art is outside in the streets and life, on the magazines cover-pages and in fashion, in films which seem low, in cheap paperbacks and marketing pictures (Oscar Massota), Pop as a contemporary art is not over yet. It seeks new modes, hunts in indefinitely multiplying pictures and videos on the internet or among temptations of ever-various objects and activities cheaply and hastily satisfying the people's lust for illusions and individualism, beauty and eternal youth. Post-industrial Pop has its vernacular, albeit dark side, the culprit of which is Dominika Horáková's contemporary photography: in empty packaging, abandoned spaces and items displaced from their commonplaceness she shows the spirituality of present days as a hybrid between 'Western' emptiness as a lack and 'Eastern' purifying emptiness which is a condition of the new beginnings.
While, however, in sixties the synonym of life was ‚reality', nowadays it is rather a word 'system'.And its parts are the traps of the ‚second nature', things which make our world somewhat artificial, shallow, disposable. Michel Houellebecq in his book To Stay Alive writes: The world comprises of suffering because it is –in its essence – free. The suffering is an unavoidable outcome of the boundless game among the individual parts of the system. You have to know that and say it.
