Feeding the Soil: Anna Hulačová and Petra Janda in AVU POP-UP Gallery

curatorial text by Mariana Serranová:

The joint installation of sculptures by Anna Hulačová and objects by Petra Janda confronts two contrasting approaches to material and shape. On the other hand, the two artists share the subject of physicality and nature in the context of an era facing the impact of toxicity and technologies on the environment and our internal processes. They base their work on the knowledge of nature, exploitation of its resources, and interconnectedness of the organic and inorganic worlds.

We are tempted to think that the plant world, with which we are connected through all our senses and digestive tract, controls us from deep roots hidden underground. In union with the Earth and the damp darkness, we become part of the cycles of fertility and decomposition.

Petra Janda’s plant relief, Eve (2020), in the form of a breast, offers a number of symbolic connotations in its patent reference to the First Woman. The artistic reduction to a circular shield or target gives femininity and motherhood exclusive sovereignty. According to the artist, the inspiration for creating Eve came from the deadly nightshade as a sacred but, at the same time, feared plant. Like other poisonous, stinging, or spiny medicinal plants, it used to be thinned out of fear. The metaphoric connection between the vital power of nature and the fertile power of women has its historical antecedents and recalls even former superstitions that placed women’s healing ability in a marginalized position. The texture of the organic pulp from which Eve consists is porous and airy due to the intact cellulose cells. The artist’s object Safe Space (2022) employs a similar principle, suggesting the profound relationship between fertility and the outside world. The meadow permaculture hay on the wire structure clearly refers to a womb with umbilical cords. Janda connects heaven and Earth, the mundane and the sacred, the instinctual and the vegetative.

Anna Hulačová’s connection of the human figure with utility plants and the soil always has a specific context: she looked back at the history and current development of agriculture. Over the last two years, she has been creating numerous sculptures and reliefs imbued with rich agricultural symbolism. The fascination with the plant world gives rise to mutating figures of hybrids and androids that suggest the conflicting but inevitable relationship between the civilized and the wild. Hulačová has also recently been drawing inspiration from insect morphology and, at other times, takes into account specific tissue, cellular, and organ structures. Her Invokers (2022) seem to approximate the occult cruelty of the Middle Ages; perhaps they are today a kind of reminder of the darkness, of timelessness as a continuum that, from time to time, materializes into something we have yet to unravel. Instead of sensory receptors in the face, we see naked entrails, cavities, and viscera. Hybrids grow through the vegetable and expand out of the human body; at other times, technicist forms, in close association with the human body, mutate into cyborgs whose embodiment reflects the forgotten recesses of our psyche.

The material and metaphysical interconnection of heaven, the underworld, and the Earth has been the subject of Darina Alster’s long-term endeavor. In her work, the related themes of sexuality, gender, religion, and the sacred are increasingly brought into a collective perspective of humanity and nature, responding to the ecological situation and perceiving with increasing intensity the traditional deep link between motherhood, healing, and nourishment through female sexuality in the context of nature and its cycles. Some of her previous projects were directly related to archetypes of the mother and pregnancy. In her performance Boundaries, she responds to Petra Janda’s new work, Safe Space. She understands it as an image of personal boundaries but does not experience limitations. It is not a barrier ‒ it is a stolon that guides her; it is tactile, but at the same time fragile: “If the Thread were to break, everything would be over. I feel the desire and the need to protect the Thread. I can’t think of it in otherwise than physically. Its existence gives me refuge. Shelter. Safe space is here due to good personal boundaries. A space for play, passion, and the possibility of interpretation...”

Paradise was believed to be some protected reserve separated from the rest of the world by a water spring ‒ a world in which abundance, harmony, and symbiosis of plants and animals reigned. It is also where humans became aware of their physical needs and fertility. Was that why they were exiled to the fields to work the land? All this is not just a myth with ethical implications but also a reminder of man’s responsibility towards life in a broader sense. It is the evolutionary story about the onset of the Neolithic when humans turned to agriculture. It is one of the crucial matrices of contemporary Anthropocene discourse, the thesis that the beginning of the human era opens with the agricultural revolution. And at the same time, in short, it is quite a timely metaphor for the survival of humans as a species on Earth.