Miss You! / Nevan Contempo Gallery, Praha, CZ / 2020 * solo exhibition
Nevan Contempo Gallery, Prague, CZ
27.5. – 31.7. 2020
Exhibited works:
Foto report:
The French anthropologist Marc Augé begins his essay on what he calls non-places by describing the everyday life of an anonymous person who spends the time of his life moving within unified spaces. Corporations, shopping malls, banks, motorways and hotel rooms, for example, all of these places make us lonely, indefinite beings. They are all environments in which we are unable to leave unpredictable memory traces of our existence from a long-term perspective. It is to these non-places involved in the final automation of life that David Možný returns again and again in his installations. The artist does not work with object or sculpture, but draws on an aesthetic of computer animation. In essence, we enter into a situation, an installation, that can be compared to a suspended sequence extracted from the timeline. We do not know what exactly happened before we entered, but a bullet hole in four of five sheets of glass hints at a story. It is relatively short, lasting 0.015 seconds, which is the time the fired cartridge needed to penetrate the glass barriers. The shot is what makes us uneasy and disrupts the neutral minimalism of the perceived environment. The confrontation of one’s self with the trajectory of the projectile in a transparent glass “labyrinthine” is a physical and yet existential experience. One becomes aware of the potential for fragility, scarcity, death, loss, as well as desire, to which we are led in an almost underhand way by the ambiguity of the inscription Miss You stamped on every bullet. An understanding of the whole comes at the end of the installation, at the imaginary point of safety next to the intact glass, where the already fired projectile would not have been able to drill into our bodies. The world produces 14,000,000,000 bullets a year, i.e. 445 bullets a second and 44 bullets every single blink of an eye. We are among the survivors. Is this not just cause for a feeling of guilt? After weeks of isolation we return to the public spaces of non-places, now not simply aesthetically sterile but carefully disinfected. Open offices, shopping centres, airport halls and banks will once again fill with people. The system of which we are a part assures us that we are returning to normal, and continues to claim it is protecting our lives. But from whom, in fact? When looking at the pile of bullets with the inscription Miss You I find myself thinking about desire and death. I have the feeling that these two indices of life have a lot in common, not least for the way they brutally awaken us from the illusion of security, sufficiency and satiety.
text: Jana Písaříková
Photos:
Tomáš Souček / 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 09, 11, 12, 13