Regarding the Pain of Others
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Authors: Mária Maxová, Tamara Almáši, Marianna Franková, Sofia Blahová
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Curator and exhibition architect: Maroš Bavolár
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Duration: October 16 – November 28
About the Exhibition
The upcoming collective exhibition titled "Regarding the Pain of Others" refers conceptually to the eponymous book essay by American author Susan Sontag. In her works, she addressed objectification and the perception of corporeality from a social and socio-political perspective. She also explored bodily illness, its contagion, and what the resolution of these contagions means for the social context of the era in which she lived.
The authors collectively work with the theme of illness, strong personal mythology, and it also represents a kind of post-COVID coming to terms with the fragility of their own and bodies close to the authors. Feminist extensions of the authors' thinking are also present, whose connection to the theme of corporeality is a current topic.
Works of the Authors
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Mária Maxová and Tamara Almáši In their ceramic work, they deal with the theme of objectification, which Susan Sontag explains in her essay. The duo has been researching corporeality (anthropomorphized and in figurative painting) for a long time. In vaginal ceramics, they focus on the theme of body perception, both their own and alienated. Exploring one's own existence through sensitive touches of bodies opens questions of self-love and body dysmorphia and addresses male objectification of female naked bodies on several levels of social critique, where the woman is minimized to fragments of the body as the only means to gain control. The woman explores her body with sensitive touches, reaching all its extremities and gaining her own conscious dominance.
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Marianna Franková On sheets taken from a hospital environment from her grandmother, she builds metaphors on femininity and motherhood. Hidden mythologies and histories contained in hospital textiles serve the author as a subtle foundation for the work on which she builds her drawing compositions. The wild female figures on the canvas bring a form of confident heroism to the exhibition. Through them, the author detaches from established structures and prejudices and opens new ways of understanding and decoding the exhibition to the audience. Despite the reduced colorfulness, the hanging canvas by Marianna Franková is the most intense work of the entire exhibition.
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Sofia Blahová She is engaged in ceramic work, where the theme of illness is conceived with two sensitive perspectives. The first is coping with illness and closing one's eyes to what is happening. The second perspective is depicting the collective existence in the coexistence of humans and animals, which are very close to the author. These two diverse subjects on her works help each other to endure worries and difficulties associated with illness and add to a personal form of sensitive resistance and assistance.