Auto-moto-dým
curated by: Mia Milgrom, Natálie Kubíková
artist:
Barbora Dayef
2.6. - 28.7. 2022
Our attention is dissolving within the rising fog. Low visibility and fragments of stories, that happened somewhere on the border of an industrial ruin and a home, suggest some sort of a game. The pillars are becoming shadows of standing bodies and then turn back into waterpipes. In certain moments the voices and gestures become alive, the fire is being maintained till late nights and then everything goes quiet again. All we are left with are artifacts, fallen shards of objects and our own mirrored image. All threads have a way of turning into traces.
Auto-moto-dým mediates decay and social chaos, it becomes a comment on personal relationships and their influence on structures of hierarchy. The verticality of the endless columns and the uneven surfaces function as reminders of an increasing probability of collapse. Allegorical stories, which inspired the performative dialogues, compel us not just towards their framed form, but also to branching sub-stories and tales within tales, referring to the cycles of events. This intimate moment is an unarticulated connection, where one is listening and the other hears something.
Expanding in the space are hand-made ceramic waterpipes, which fuse a visual link between modernist architecture and ancient columns. The time also seems to be distorted in scale, as we move through the labyrinth navigated by rays of construction laser. Have we arrived to the scene too late, or are we simply meant to slowly observe the disintegration? Barbora Dayef is a striking artist, who combines sculpture with performance. Her interest in ancient cultures brought her to eastern allegorical stories, where through mundane situations and mind games we are left to search for solutions to our most inner feelings and society-wide questions.
In times when structures thought to be stable are falling apart, we continue to invite both local artists and artists from around the world to work with topics of stability and to explore the seismic shifts that our decade is bringing. We would like to create a polyphonic and plural space that allows a variety of encounters and dialogues and that collapses the walls between different narratives. Barbora Dayef’s exhibition is the first in our new season titled Heavenly Bodies, inspired by a painting by the Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo. Tamayo’s Heavenly Bodies (1946) indicate mental constructs that join stars into constellations. The painting can be seen as a metaphor for resurgence of imaginative stories that were long lost. Old tales can become foundations for new structures and systems of communication, they offer new ways of reading our histories outside of linear time.