L’identité

Admission: free (the museum ticket office will issue you a ticket with zero value)

Opening hours: Tuesday 10 am – 8 pm, Wednesday to Sunday 10 am – 6 pm, Monday closed

Guided tours: February 25th and April 1st from 6:00 PM

KodlContemporary announces the exhibition L’identité, which runs from 12 February to 10 April at Prague’s Museum of Decorative Arts. The exhibition, put together by art historian and curator Pavlína Morganová and inspired by the life and work of Toyen, looks at questions of female identity across multiple generations. Through more than two dozen works by contemporary artists, L’identité explores our uniqueness and distinctiveness and the impossibility of putting into words our perception of ourselves and of others.

The French title of the exhibition refers not only to Toyen’s second life in Paris, but also to Milan Kundera’s 1997 novel Identity, originally published in French as L’Identité and only recently translated into his native Czech.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the paintings of the Czech artist Marie Čermínová (a.k.a. Toyen, 1902–1980). This unique twentieth-century figure was an important representative of the Czech avant-garde and later also of international Surrealism. Starting in the early 1920s, she expressed an exceptional sensitivity and consistently rejected social stereotypes, as reflected in her choice of a gender-neutral pseudonym. She was a member of the Mánes Association of Fine Artists and the Devětsil Artistic Union, and her joint activities with Jindřich Štyrský produced the artistic style known as Artificialism and subsequently firmly anchored her in the Surrealist movement. After the Second World War, she left for France, where she was involved with the Paris Surrealist Group until her death.

The art of Toyen has influenced generations of artists who have explored questions of identity from the 1970s to the present day. One example is the profoundly existential work of Adriena Šimotová (1926–2014), who from the 1960s until the end of her life focused on people and their fragile physicality as the central theme of her work. This was followed by the conceptual creations of Margita Titlová Ylovska (1957), who already in the 1980s was experimenting with her body and working with energetic gestures while creating original drawings made with the help of a Kirlian camera. The subject of women’s bodies and female sexuality also appears in the work of three artists who established themselves after 1989. Veronika Šrek Bromová (1966) introduced the concept of digitally manipulated photography onto the Czech art scene and more recently has taken a close interest in people’s relationship to nature and mythology. Kateřina Vincourová (1968), known for her refined installations and minimalist spatial arrangements, explores the relationships between physical experience and our surroundings. And Lenka Klodová (1969) mixes sculpture and performance to study questions of gender, motherhood, and the politics of nudity.

The exhibition has chosen several artists to represent the wide range of contemporary artistic approaches and tendencies of the twenty-first century. Pavla Sceranková (1980) uses her intermedia work combining sculpture, video, and performance to explore our relationship with our bodies and the world around us. Leading Czech video artist Mark Ther (1979) touches on taboo subjects such as sexuality or the fate of the Sudeten Germans. Women’s status in society and power relations are the subject of the artist duo of Anetta Mona Chişa (1975) and Lucia Tkáčová (1977), who apply an ironic subversiveness to comment on hierarchies in art and society. The artistic duo known as unconductive trash (Michal Pěchouček, 1973; Rudi Koval, 1991) creates sewn painting that reinterpret historical and contemporary visuality and look at gender stereotypes through the lens of collaborative experimental art-making. And the youngest artist on display, Lucie Rosická (1998), uses textiles and a sewing machine to explore everyday rituals and intimate moments associated with female identity or sexuality.

The carefully selected works, some of which have been provided on loan from private and public collections, bear witness to the situations and traumas that people faced in the past and continue to face today. They let us glimpse various aspects of gender and sexuality while revealing layers of social relations and of social and personal identity – they celebrate its multilayeredness. In some cases, they may even surprise us by shining a light on things that normally remain hidden. Indeed, our notions regarding our own identity and that of others may be repeatedly shaken throughout our lives.

Milan Kundera explored these “moments of disarray” in his novel L’Identité. Like a surgeon, he dissects his characters’ decisions, their inner feelings, and the often very different way their actions are seen by others. The story moves along the indistinct boundary between imagination and dreams, teetering on the edge of the moment when, as he writes near the end of the novel, “the real turn[s] into the unreal, reality into reverie.” Like this exhibition, Kundera confronts us with the complexity of human identity as it is exposed to everyday challenges. In her introductory text for the exhibition’s catalogue, curator Pavlína Morganová writes, “I believe that, besides confronting us with these delicate and challenging themes, the exhibited works are a testament to the unparalleled strength and originality of art made within the context of the Czech art scene.”