Wasteland
Eva Kot’atkova and Dominik Lang
Project Arts Centre ON TOUR
Monday 15 June – Saturday 25 July 2015
at Wexford Arts Centre
Exhibition Event
You are invited to a closing reception/finissage on Saturday 25 July 4-6pm, with guest speaker Tessa Giblin, Curator – Project Arts Centre.
Wasteland will transform Wexford Arts Centre’s lower gallery into an absurd playground overflowing with salvaged objects, postal packages, sculptures and debris. Nestled amidst its poetic surrounds the story of the artists’ attempts to dismantle and relocate a public park to a new location also unfolds. This exhibition explores the institutional rules and regulations that pervade our lives, and what happens when things slip through the cracks. Wasteland marks the first collaboration between Czech artists Eva Kot’atkova and Dominik Lang.
Eva Kot’atkova and Dominik Lang are both fascinated by the institutional characteristics of the pervasive systems that shape and determine our lives. The exhibition suggests at once a storage yard, a ghost estate, a repository of ideas and methodologies that have passed, but whose remains prompt us towards an inner logic that reveals or obscures their purpose. The mundane and salvaged objects populating the exhibition create a vocabulary of forms that could remain after an institution has been wound down – abandoned objects that remain without anyone to witness them or to respond, but which recreate the daily illusion of order through institutional rules.
Eva Kot’atkova daily drawing practice involves cutting, collaging, splicing and marking. Her installations and sculptures are underpinned by similar processes, where objects and subject matter are found, fabricated, captured or suggested, stimulated by the practices and accumulated evidence from institutions of psychiatry, education and indeed theatre, and infused with the psychological and physical effects of restraint, moulding and manipulation. Kot’atkova is constantly exploring the body through gesture, language (and its limitations) and architecture.
Dominik Lang has located many of his previous works in the architecture, infrastructure or politics of the art world as social institution. The alteration or ‘correction’ of aspects of architecture (the level of the floor, positioning of a staircase or function of certain museum rooms) are areas he has sought to adjust. From the troves of Czech history of art to the overflowing shelves of his family home, the life and exploration of historical objects repeatedly surface throughout his practice, and the way in which these histories are accessed, understood, and abstracted are an enduring field of interest.
Wasteland was originally commissioned by Project Arts Centre, curated by Tessa Giblin and produced with thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin City Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This tour is supported by an Arts Council Touring Award. Wexford Arts Centre is the third partner venue on the tour. The exhibition has travelled to the Mermaid Arts Centre and Limerick City Gallery of Art, and will be shown in Droichead Arts Centre and Uileann, West Cork Arts Centre.
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Eva Kot’atkova has exhibited in the recent international exhibitions of Venice Biennale (2013), Moscow Biennale (2013), Sydney Biennale (2012) and Lyon Biennale (2011), as well as making solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford and KunstvereinBraunschweig in 2013, amongst others. She studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, Prague Academy of Applied Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and AkademieBildendeKunst Wien from 2002-2007. In 2007 she became the youngest artist ever to be awarded the JindrichChalupecky Award for young artists in the Czech Republic.
Dominik Lang exhibited in La Triennale (2012), and has presented recent solo exhibitions in Secession, Vienna (2013), Kunsthaus Dresden (2012), and in the Pavilion of the Czech Republic at the 54th Venice Biennale (2010). He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2008, while taking one year during his studies at Cooper Union in New York and the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. Currently he is head of the sculpture studio at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, together with Edith Jerabkova, and in 2013 he was also awarded the JindrichChalupecky Award for young artists.
Wasteland will run in the lower gallery of Wexford Arts Centre from Saturday 13 June to Saturday 25 July 2015. For further information on the exhibition please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager on +353 (0)53 9123764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie.
