PETRA VLČKOVÁ

SPHERE DANCE

OPENING: 5. 11. 2024 OD 19H
EXHIBITION: 6. 11. – 30. 12. 2024

In her work, Sphere Dance, Petra Vlčková is exploring sclerosis multiplex, her autoimmune illness that she suffers from. As a bearer of the disease and an artist, she reflects on her own physical, cognitive, and emotional experience with the disease through visual metaphors. Approaching the theme from different viewpoints, these include her personal memories, looking back at the treatment, contemplating the root causes that led to the onset of the disease (e.g., ancestral genetic predispositions), observing the physical changes to her body, and perceiving her own identity, dignity, and self-worth as a woman.
Given the nature of the illness, the experience of living with it is hardly transferrable. In her artwork, the artist therefore uses indirect means of expression rather than documenting the actual symptoms. She has deliberately chosen the color of gold as a symbolic cue to depict her illness and its manifestation. By using gold, she subversively adds another layer, declaring that sclerosis multiplex is, in a certain sense, precious, but is also bringing pain, causing the loss of integrity, affecting personal relationships.
Through imaginative photographs and collages, Petra Vlčková turns her daily struggles into a dreamlike world in which she feels submerged into a porridge (eventually becoming the porridge!), loses her balance and falls over and over again, forming a pile of corpses, walks an endless desert or imagines herself dancing around during her MRI scan. These sensual experiences, mostly unpleasant in reality, have an emancipating effect. They shift her perception beyond the reach of the senses. The artist is continuously coming to terms with her illness and better understands being with it. Existential questions also arise when acknowledging the fragility of body and mind. But above all, the very process of creation becomes an elaborate coping strategy. It gives way to the artist to reconcile with the illness and seek a way to live her life.
Petra Vlčková (*1985) has been studying at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, where she is currently completing her doctoral studies. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad and her work has been published in prestigious photography magazines.
Curator: Branislav Štěpánek

Our exhibition programme is supported by grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the State Fund for Culture of the Czech Republic, the City of Prague and the Prague 1 Municipal District. Thank you!