Regarding the Pain of Others
Authors: Mária Maxová, Tamara Almáši, Marianna Franková, Sofia Blahová
Exhibition Curator and Architect: Maroš Bavolár
Dates: October 16 – November 28
The group exhibition titled “Regarding the Pain of Others” draws its concept from the essay of the same name by American author Susan Sontag, who explored the objectification and perception of the body from a social and socio--political critical perspective. She also examined the morbidity of the body, its diseases, and what the treatment of these diseases meant for the social context of the era in which she lived. The four authors further expand on these phenomena by incorporating feminist tendencies, personal mythology, the themes of crip activism, formal expressions of corporeality, and a critique of patriarchal structures. At the same time, it is also a kind of post-COVID coming to terms with the physicality of one’s own body or that of people close to the artists.
In their ceramic work, Maxová and Almáši explore the theme of literal objectification, where the perception of the body shifts between the observed and the observers. The duo has long been engaged in research on physicality—both anthropomorphized and in figurative painting. In their Ionic ceramics, the duo focuses on the theme of body perception, the body—both one’s own and the alienated—which examines itself through sensitive touches and raises not only questions of body dysmorphia but also, on multiple levels of social critique, addresses the male objectification of female nude bodies. In this case, the woman is reduced to mere fragments of her body—her body as the sole means of regaining control over herself. In the drawings, the artists begin to separate themselves. Almáši depicts a home that, however, formally transforms into details of the human body. This drawing, with its almost “neo-Gothic” feel, uses sharp edges to pierce, destroy, and rebuild the body. Like her own home. Maxová transforms herself into an animal, and the animal transforms into her. The body becomes anthropomorphized and decomposes in deep water.
In her large-format fabric paintings, Franková illustrates folk and social sexuality, once again dividing the situation into “us” and “them”—the watched and the watchers. The collective identity of voyeuristic men on the canvases devours the female body and sucks its bodily fluids. At the same time, the artist incorporates hospital fabric and household canvas. Through these materials, she expands the context of the works to include the themes of domesticity and folk culture, where smaller canvases depict the politicization of the body and offer an almost etymological glimpse into the past, where terms describing the body are concealed behind colloquial diminutives and humor.
In the exhibited ceramics, Blahová conceives of illness as something worth resisting. The fragility of the suspended works in the exhibition is linked to the fragility of a body marked by illness, where closed eyes and a stooped posture illustrate initial impressions. However, an open and resilient eye soon emerges, seeking out sensitive moments of awakening and introspection. On one ceramic piece, we see a dog offering much-needed help and quiet defiance to a person trapped by illness.