Chiasmus

Olga Mikh Fedorova, Milan Mazúr, Iryna Zakharova: CHIASMUS
Curated by Viktor Čech

Pragovka Gallery Rear, Prague
24. 5. – 5. 7. 2018

Our body is an object, just like many things around us. When we take someone else’s hand and our fingers intertwine, it is as if the boundary between whose finger is ours and whose is theirs disappears for a moment. The intertwining of the physical expansiveness of two individuals, or of our body with an object, shifts our physical self-awareness. We find ourselves in a situation where our body is an object and the object is part of us.

Sometimes these are just brief moments before our conscious control brings us back to pragmatic reality, other times it is a moment we would like to stay in as long as possible. Sometimes there may be no direct contact; after all, our perception of our surroundings is influenced by all our senses. Even our gaze in the mirror evokes, thanks to the inverted image, a feeling of strangely familiar yet alienated appearance. Chiasmus is actually a crossing over; in literary science, it is a so-called syntactic parallelism, which is not unlike the situation with the mirror, or our perception of the other as our mirror.

Playing with aesthetics of material installations and computer graphics, 3D models, or the spectacular illusion of postproduction of moving images is nowadays taken, also in the art, as a something with physical feeling. Similarly, the final form of this exhibition should work as a physical intersection of projected visual corporealities three artists.

Olga Mikh Fedorova (*1980) realizes her artwork mainly through the work in the virtual space of 3D computer graphics. Her figurative scenes, which she presents both through videos and static prints and objects, use the contemporary aesthetics of recycled 3D models to surrealist tradition based on associations, deformations and unexpected encounters in which the human body plays its leading role and its innumerable physical and situational mutations. Her world “behind the mirror”, however, often reveals obvious critical references to what we actually experience in our half-physical, half-virtual experiences. The Moscow-born artist graduated at ENSAV La Cambre, Brussels (painting studio), and currently lives and works in Brussels.

Milan Mazúr (*1989) is the artist whose visual language is constantly balancing on the edge between the spectacularity of contemporary mass visuality and its questioning, including the critical social context. His videos and films enter a wider installation framework in which the author often uses the contrast of everyday subtleties and its expressive deconstruction. It constantly moves between the submissiveness of the artificial sweetener of the consumer culture, and it conceals the ubiquitous existential anxiety. The artist was born in Slovakia, graduated at the UMPRUM (Studio of Intermediate Confrontations) and currently lives and works in Prague.

Iryna Zakharova (*1985) has often played with videos, objects and installations with the moment when our popular visuals are literally under the skin. Her work with materials and seemingly trivial details exploits the strength of the association of everyday objects and everyday kitsch with physical experiences. Ukraine’s Kharkov-born author graduated at FAMU, Prague (photographic department).