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| Kateřina
Šedá 24 November 2007 – 20 January 2008 |
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Opening |
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Kateřina
Šedá’s method operates on
the principle of bringing
herself into the game to initiate, together with others, an artistic
process or an action that she then implements and records in different
media. In the extensive project “Je to jedno” (“It Doesn’t Matter,” 2005–2007) the artist turns her attention to her grandmother, Jana Šedá, who after a very busy life became totally inert and lost interest in all activities, giving the same answer to every request or question: “It doesn’t matter.” Šedá began to work with her, to mobilize her memories of her former activities at a large hardware store in Brno, and even managed to get her to remember 650 different articles sold there, along with their prices. Šedá then urged her to draw these articles and name them, whereupon her grandmother drew a total of 176 objects in her own unique line, with a great sense of the emblematic characteristics of the things, many of them drawn on a single sheet in serial fashion, according to their different retail sizes. She enjoyed this work, and it drew her out of her lethargy. The exhibition shows a selection of fifty of these drawings and an accompanying, comprehensive interview carried out by the artist with her grandmother. Šedá continues her work with her grandmother, with new tasks in the piece entitled “Vnučka” (“Granddaughter,” 2006–2007). She puts together three different series of questionnaires that she goes through with her grandmother over the course of a year, “1 x denně před jídlem” (“1x daily before meals”). Once a day before eating, her grandmother writes down the answer to one of the questions. The exhibition shows a total of fifty of these completed questionaires. The drawings and questionaires are a final and enduring testimonial to Jana Šedá, who died in early 2007. In the project “Každej pes, jiná ves” (literally: “For every dog, a different village,” 2007) Šedá took an entire neighborhood as the object of her action, the “Plattenbau” concrete slab housing estate Nová Líšeň in her hometown, Brno-Líšeň, where the buildings had just recently been newly painted in pastel colors. The Czech saying that gives the piece its title implies that the people in this housing estate live greatly isolated from one another. Šedá takes up the abstract moment of the buildings’ industrial uniformity to initiate a process of individualization using precisely this stereotype. She had a thousand shirts produced for the thousand households there. She designed a pattern for the shirts showing the colorful concrete slab buildings in a repeating pattern—in the style of textile diamonds. She paired up the families according to a formalist diagram that she created, based on the ground plan of the development, and then sent each household a shirt “from” their partner family. Through this, Šedá sets in motion the possibility of a meeting, in which she is, however, not personally involved. She directs, but then withdraws, leaving things to take their course. The work is conceived as a spatial installation, comprising forty drawings and diagrams and a number of shirts. Also on display are reactions to the project and a video documentary. Parts of the project were shown in summer 2007 at the documenta 12 in Kassel. Kateřina Šedá was born in Brno in 1977. She lives in Brno and Prague. |
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| Katalog Kateřina Šedá For every Dog a different Master Ed. Radim Peško Texts by Jana Klusakova and Kateřina Šedá (Czech./Engl.) JRP Ringier, Zurich 2008 200 pp., 91 ill. € 18,- ISBN: 978-3-905829-66-2 Thanks to Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Turin Arratia, Beer, Berlin |
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