ANDREA SOBOTKOVÁ

THE BEAR HAS A KEEN SENSE THAT ENABLES IT TO HUNT AT DUSK

21. 6. – 28. 7. 2019

Shafts, staircases, watchtowers, bridges, ladders, chimneys. This site-specific installation in which the materialisation of the subconscious dreaming process is fabricated upon a background descriptions and photographs. Thanks to sophisticated interventions in the gallery space itself, the artist has created an environment in which each viewer finds himself in the same starting position: the uncertainty at which height they physically are. The video installation screened below the ground level presents the moment preceding ‘a fall’ and thematises the subjectivity of real and dreamt time. The question therefore inevitably arises as to what particular moment does ‘the falling’ happen in a dream? With the assistance of a camera balancing on the edge of the chimney, the artist makes it present to the viewers evoking a fictitious „muscle dance“ and the loss of solid earth beneath their feet. By employing the continuous printing process, Sobotková reminds us of the endless variety of images generated in dreams. The archive of falls carefully collected by the artist, thus becomes the atlas of collective memory and imaginary landscapes, whose form remains encoded into written language. Thus, the recorded word helps to preserve the authentic poetics of testimonies, their informational value as well as accentuation of essential details affecting the resultant ‘dream experience’.
Andrea Sobotková (1994), AVU – Studio of Intermedia Art II. Her work mainly focuses on ways of perception, culture and ontology of space, the changes of which, depending on man’s activity or inactivity, are explored. She lives and works in Prague. www.andreasobotkova.wz.cz

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