Eva Kot’átková
Eva Kot’átková’s solo show in Raster’s new gallery, located in the former seat of the ORNO jewelry artisans’ cooperative, contained elements reminiscent of stage design (curtains, benches made in situ), fragments of older works, and new collages and sculptures. Together they created an unusual and enchanting setting for her exhibition. The two rooms on the first floor were devoted to the installation Dílo přírody/Work of nature, 2011, which also gave its name to the show as a whole. The first space was dominated by geometric sculptures, some of them on the floor, others suspended from the ceiling, all made from welded metal rods and wooden elements. On two of the forms, the artist left pieces of clothing: pajama pants and a man’s white shirt. Another part of the installation was a cagelike structure that had a blanket sticking out of it. It somehow looked as if this perplexing space was inhabited.
The small “window” of the cage had the same kind of grating on it as the gallery windows. Kot’átková played with this motif on both large and small scales. The grating was a significant element of the three-dimensional works displayed on the second floor, such as Untitled, 2011 (from the series “Parallel Biography,” 2011–). It was also a pervasive component of the collages (all Untitled, 2011) displayed on the walls of the first room and upstairs. Here, the gratings oppress the human and animal bodies represented in cutouts from archival materials. They cover eyes and mouths or whole faces and thus restrict sight and speech. In many of these works, the grating, along with elements such as ladders and wheels, becomes an integral part of a more developed mechanism that subjugates entire bodies. The collages displayed on shelves on the second floor also contain plant motifs. Their stalks seem to be one more thing used to immobilize the individual. Is the work of nature a work of subjugation?
In any case, Kot’átková certainly sees education as oppressive. She turned one of the gallery rooms into a classroom by arranging uncomfortable-looking school chairs in rows. Next to the window, she piled hardcover books on geography, biology, physics, and other subjects, many of them from the 1940s. That these tomes were in Czech rather than Polish increased the sense of their inaccessibility. The screen in front of the chairs was divided into three parts and partly covered by curtains. It looked like a blackboard, but with four looped videos projected on it. Sit Up Straight, 2008, show pupils reading or raising their hands to answer a teacher’s question. They are all shown as trapped in devices “correcting” their posture, again made from metal rods and wood. As the exhibition text suggests, the tendency “to use different correction tools” is for vertebrates “a pre-cultural gesture.” A primordial inspiration for their construction is the skeletal system. Correction tools, like cages and gratings, are built in reaction to social fears. They trigger the need for social order and hierarchy. Kot’átková’s is a bleak interpretation of social dynamics, albeit a persuasive one.