Through vulnerability, I can come closer to others

The theme of Kristina Láníková’s art, in which image and text are complementing each other to the same extent, is vulnerability. The selection from her artistic documentation presented at the Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts (GAVU) captures the physical experience associated with “healing”. Formally spare assemblages, objects or videos use simple motifs such as leather scraps or the outlines of plasters and pharmaceutical blister packs to refer to the relationship between the body and medication, but also between intimacy and power. The artist reflects on the socially constructed categories of health and illness through fragmented representation and the unspoken, through the imprints of her own memory and history, which she approaches while keeping her distance as an archive that she arranges by means of selection, variation or working in series. In this way, the intimate undergoes depersonalization and makes visible the mechanisms of control. This is not just a criticism of a particular form of medical practice or an artistic update of a feminist approach to corporeality. At the period of time characterized by feelings of exhaustion and fatigue from living in the world focused on success and performance, Kristina Láníková presents vulnerability as a common limitation. The outlines of a place where we can be together are not to be discerned very well.

Curator Marianna Placáková