As human beings, we feel safe in the known and charted territory. Today maps can tell us where we are right now, find us in an urban or natural landscape; social rules and habits navigate us through our lives.
Online networks based on our behavior and preferences may suggest a perfect match for a friend or a soulmate. News streams, music apps, and movie hubs deliver entertainment we are most likely to enjoy. A similar scheme is adapted to our educational path, professional career planning, working environment and vocational development.
A Look Behind the Grid – Art of Structures, Spaces, and Technology
Artist talk
Place: Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin
Wilhelmstraße 44 / Entrance via Mohrenstraße Berlin, Germany 10117
Date: 21.09.2017 / 7 pm
During an artist talk and a conversation with the current artist in residence, Markéta Magidová (CZ) and Berlin-based Laure Catugier (FR) and Philip Topolovac (DE) we would like to take a different perspective on today’s reality and look behind the grid. Discuss the topics such as a desire for knowledge, order, and power in our society, structures created by architecture, design and technology.
Markéta Magidová is an intermedia artist – she mostly uses video, installation, performance, text, and photography. In her works, she focuses on the structures of language, social behavior, both physical and mental movements of a man in a normative grid and pre-defined space. Analysis of stressful and unexpected situations can be seen as the main axis of her artistic strategy. She ironically reveals subjective perspectives or mistakes in systems demanding objectivity, explores inferiority and dominance in human interference, creates misbalance in preferably fluent and effective movements, asymmetry in the world of symmetry, deformation of reality swallowed by virtuality.She problematizes binarity of human judgments and ideas, shows the absurdity of desire for knowledge, order, and power.
Laure Catugier experiments with the forms of existing construction and evaluates them with her own measurement tools. Based on a language specific to architecture, she tries to capture the emptiness that inhabits them. Through an interdisciplinary approach, she attempts to foreground the void, absence, silence. She applies protocols that attempt to confuse all indications of time and space, often amplified by a back-and-forth mechanical gesture. With this closed-circuit system, she strives to sabotage and jeopardize the apparently stable foundations on which the Architect, with a capital “A”, relies on. Supported by humor and irony, her universe is composed of architectonic elements inspired by the Modernist Movement. A place where the body is often under stress and searches for its own equilibrium.
Philip Topolovac in his work raises the questions of image and reality, of formats and sizes of the aesthetic. The mechanization of the modern world, the omnipresence of technologies that hardly anyone still understands, and the changes this brings about in the way we perceive things, are themes that preoccupy Topolovac, as is the precise observation of landscapes. Observant and playful, using the sense of touch or a historical perspective, he attempts to uncover the essence of things in his sculptures, installations, and series of slides. Philip Topolovac searches for the sign in the marginal. Ironically, the methods of observation that Topolovac presents to us reveal at the same time their limitations: everything perceived by the senses, the results of all observations, remain in the final analysis subordinate to the subjective interpretation of human beings.
Artistic residency of Markéta Magidová is part of a collaborative project between AIR FUTURA, Berlin Sessions Residency and Berlinerpool Arts Network.
The artist talk A Look Behind the Grid is realized with a friendly support of Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin.
Image: Markéta Magidová