Jiří Kovanda / Planetarium
We sincerely invite you to the solo exhibition of Jiří Kovanda Planetarium, in the Center for Contemporary Art in Szczecin, Poland.
EXHIBITION:
April 11 – May 30, 2019
OPENING:
April 11, 2019 (Thursday) at 7pm
CURATOR:
Michal Koleček
The exhibition at the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art marks the first time that Jiří Kovanda (born in 1953) – one of the most prominent and influential contemporary Czech artists, who is also widely acknowledged and presented in the international context – is showing his artwork to the Szczecin public. Particularly after 2000, the artist has been invited to participate in a number of key art shows, including Dokumenta 13 in Kassel in 2007, the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2012, and the Istanbul Biennial in 2013, and his artwork is included in the collections owned by prestigious institutions, such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kovanda’s artwork is certainly not unknown in Poland, and he has recently had solo shows at the Arsenal Gallery Bialystok (2012) and at the Wroclaw Contemporary Museum (2013). For that matter, it is worth mentioning the fact that Kovanda’s very first solo exhibition was held in 1976 at the Mospan Gallery in Warsaw, an event also associated with the destructive social situation in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia at the peak of the “normalisation period”, where any official public presentation of this artist’s work in the existing atmosphere was just about impossible to imagine.
Nevertheless, Kovanda’s exhibition at the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art is different from his previous appearances in Poland and, at the same time, belongs to his not very numerous, but that much more inspirational, line of original projects, focused on implementing monumental site-specific interventions. In relation to this, it is necessary to preferentially mention his installations in the classic White Cube of the Vienna Secession Pavilion in 2010, and in the unorthodox Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, which is a part of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, in 2012. In his projects, Kovanda always sensitively reacts not only to the characteristic layout of the exhibition space for which they are intended, but also to the potential of their content, meaning, and, quite frequently, their emotional impact.
For the monumental central hall of this building, originally an electric trafo station in Szczecin but now used for exhibition purposes, the artist created a dominant, determinative yet subtle, and to a certain degree intimate, installation composed of standard albeit hypertrophied electric cables, light sockets, and glowing light bulbs, which flows through the space in vertical lines and temporarily returns it to its former purpose. At the same time, the artist thematically turns to what is one of the deepest sources of human civilisation. This is, without a doubt, the perception and reflection of the infinity of the universe and its main points of reference in the form of both the actual and metaphorical energy of the stars blazing in the night sky, and the artist uses illuminated points to compose images of the constellations Aries, Delphinus, Lyra, and Libra. Using this method Kovanda also unobtrusively thematises the conversion associated with transforming a former industrial building to “an operations centre and an observatory for contemporary art”, which latently conceals within itself electrifying provocative potential, as the energy that used to be produced here and distributed further to meet the needs of the local community is symbolically concentrated within its walls, both visualising and sacralising. The artist offers this concentrated and subtly glowing power to all who visit the trafo station today for their own use – as if he were inviting them to transform themselves into a state where they are moving human capacitors who store within themselves and further distribute the positive energy of artistic experience throughout their surroundings. But for this to happen, it is necessary to stop in the middle of Kovanda’s shimmering force field, to come to a standstill in the subtle twilight and to look for the sources of their own potential, to illuminate even possibly forgotten corners of their imagination that have been covered over by the hustle and bustle of daily obligations.
Following through on the intentions of Jiří Kovanda’s large installation in the main hall of the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, a selection of his older works has also been assembled, and they are displayed along the elevated walkways and in the adjacent screening rooms, not only representing some of the most crucial tendencies in the artist’s work but also modelling the broader context of his dominant unrepeatable site-specific work that reacts to the architectural structure as well as to the former purpose of this impressive building.
The unpretentious collections give exhibition visitors the opportunity to become familiar with what are today the iconic actions and minimalist interventions produced by Jiří Kovanda during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the experimental visual forms from his post-conceptual period which emerged during the 1990s within the atmosphere of the post-totalitarian social transformation, and examples of the artist’s return to performative forms and subversive site-specific installation art that characterise the expressive strategy he developed in the new millennium. In the logically limited scope of the exhibition at the TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, it is thus possible to concentratedly follow one of the determinant latent aspects of Jiří Kovanda’s art, which undisputedly represents a relationship to space, and which in a completely natural way rises to the surface specifically within the context of his verticals of light in Szczecin.
Ultimately, along with mentioning the emphasis Kovanda places on dimensional relationships, one also needs to be aware of the entirely fundamental transformation in his perception of space in the social, geographic, and emotional senses, which during the relevant period – meaning from the 1970s to the present day – took place gradually, in several waves, and was connected with, amongst other things, political changes, peaking globalisation, and technological development. Although Jiří Kovanda has actually created only a small number of truly large and dominant works, in his self-reflective expressive mode the perception and thematization of space remains one of the most important issues tracked over the long-term. Maybe it is specifically here that one may find the source determining the influence this artist has had on the situation in the art world at the start of a new millennium. Made under completely different circumstances and with diametrically varying parameters for establishing and experiencing social and physical dimensions, both Kovanda’s older works and his current ones open the path to defining a new a identity for contemporary Czech, and, in the broader sense, Central European art. This identity stands with one foot in the past and the other in the future, based on open participation with the accessible surroundings, and built on spatial relationships corresponding to the physical capabilities of an individual and resisting both the strengthening virtuality of social existence and technological dependence. In this respect, a synonym that may be used for Kovanda’s perception of space is closeness, as it is closeness that was, and still continues to be, the crucial theme in the process of developing not only expressive strategies but also the actual purpose of art in a vast part of the Central European countries, where they are slowly, but ever more distinctly, following a circular path leading back to the recidivism of ideological emptiness and impersonal systemic manipulation.
Michal Koleček