Sparks Detector
Milada Othová (1944), Laurence Sturla, Jáchym Helena Šimek, Hubert Švaříček
The Berlinskej Model Gallery opens its next exhibition in 2025, continuing a year-long series of exhibitions connecting artists of different generations. The second artist from the oldest generation of living women artists will be Milada Othová (1944).
Warmer. Hot?
The warning whistle and golden spark of the detector anchors our attention, indicating the presence of foreign elements in our immediate environment. It locates material memory records, uncovers layers of possible plots, fingerprint traces. The grooves and scratches on the metal plates reflect moments of stoppage; the craters in the metallic surface’s smoothness tell of the mutability of events. These reflections merge into an illusory image that we have forgotten is an illusion.
As Georges Didi-Huberman muses, the object is not ‘that which shows itself’, but ‘that which defiantly returns’ — like a trace, a decal, a memory mass. The object carries layers of time that do not reveal themselves in a linear fashion, but gradually emerge through material details, distortions and cracks. It is this ambiguity that makes the object a site of history, not as an archive, but as a rupture that allows the past to affect the present once again. Therefore, memory is not merely what it preserves, but the agent that makes duration possible.
The material is not a mere carrier, but an active medium of memory and presence. It incorporates traces within its own physical properties and relationships, thereby denying us complete control over them. It is a subject that lends a voice to corrosion and other chemical transformations which disrupt the work’s seemingly immobile form. Here, the difference between present perception and the past is not simply a matter of intensity or distance from the original moment of experience. It is a tension between the present, which actively draws us in, and the past, which has settled as a silent record. Patina, oxidation, layering and deconstruction of materials are not signs of immobility, but of a materialised past.
The apparent uniformity of the medium establishes a connection between the different generations of artists represented here, whose works differ in technique and scale. Materials enter into a layered dialogue of rawness and metallic composites, melding the works together across time. The nature of the alloy is therefore not just a technical process, but also a conceptual framework — a hybrid configuration of different influences. The works are layered as parts of one shared deposit. This principle has become our method of interpretation and curatorial approach: the substances anchor, clarify and overwrite each other, forming an alloy that transcends time and is brought together in this exhibition. Although the selected works were not created simultaneously or from the same raw materials, they share a material continuity that overlaps, melts, mixes and turns to dust technologically. The layering and imitation is not an assemblage here, but a settling process that coalesces into a material with new properties.