It started with a memory…
Curator Nina Moravcová within exhibitions for Desfours Palace
Mo–Fr 16:00–22:00, Sa–Su 14:00–22:00
Opening and closing until 24:00
Artists: Dana Bartoníčková, Jana Bernartová, Filip Cenek, Magdaléna Kašparová, Alena Kotzmannová, Markéta Othová, Lucia Papčová, Janek Rous
Our desires grow stronger. Sometimes we manage to fulfil them. But our living space keeps getting smaller. Trying to carry out our duties, we perceive the passing days, weeks, months and the changing seasons only peripherally. The pace is getting faster and faster. We’re still trying to define the clear horizon we’re heading to but the weight of the circumstances makes us scrape the barrel and lose direction. Looking back, we feel the spent time as an indefinite flow ourmemories – images, sounds, flashes of light… – seem to surface from.
What was the last summer like? Was it as rainy as this year? I’m trying to remember. All I recallis the green and the smell of the air after the rain. Nothing else. I’m beginning to understand why my grandmother always started her storytelling with the following words: “That was when…” I say that, too. Every evening. When I tell stories to my little son. That was when Grandpa Jaromír was a small boy, just like you… My son makes his grandfather’s gesture and then touches his belly with a finger, laughing like a drain. I wonder what his idea of time is. How is it shaped? I often ask about it. Or myself. And others. How do they perceive time? As an objective, measurable quantity? As a timer regularly measuring everything? Minute by minute, day after day, week after week, year after year. Like the clattering carousel slides one after another; the darkness; rewind, and back again. Or do they associate time with their subjective experience? Do they think time is a sequence of events where only the most intense moments defining our seminal experience stand out and become measures of real life, toolsto help us find our way in the experienced reality?
I often try to think of something concrete and remember the time. In vain. That’s why I keep records. Quite sloppily though. Sometimes, when I fear I might forget everything, I’m trying to remember things even more eagerly. From time to time, I look into my journals. I’ve put them into my library. One like the other. With their spines facing the room. I have to laugh at how little I remember when I look at them. Sometimes I browse through them. I go through my confused records and ask myself, how could I forget about this? Images start emerging. Like film frames. Once it occurred to me that when the date would begin with the number two, things wouldn’t look well. They don’t.But maybe we just sometimes see things in too much contrast or in too vague colours that blend into a continuous gradient. Everything seems to be in the background of what we experience. The passing time makes our memory uncertain, blurs the clear contours of our memories. If we look back or look at something again, we never see the same thing. Is it like reading the same book for the second time? Or are we looking at things with someone else’s eyes?
Nina Moravcová
As a part of the exhibition UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE ›
