Caliban and the Witches

0.09 – 24.09.23 (25.09 on appointement)
Opening 20. 09 17.00 – 23.00
Performance 19h – 20. 9.
Open daily 10–18h
Part of SUMO 2023
Part of Prague Art Week

This exhibition is a tribute to Silvia Federici‘s essay Caliban and the witch. The author describes how the sixteenth-century witch-hunt was an instrument of domination of the female body, in the service of capitalism‘s control over the reproduction of labour power. Like the work of the Italian-American researcher, this exhibition is political: it is ecological, it is feminist, this exhibition is resolutely anti-capitalist.

Ecological, because convinced that content and form can no longer be in contradiction. The exhibition began in Paris when we left by train, is expressed in the standard of welcome given to the artists and in the production of the works. It will end with the return of the works by grouped transport. The significance of the story we are telling here is fundamental. However, at a time when the living world is in its death throes, there is no reason why human stories and creations should diminish the life capital of our cohabitants.

Feminist, because this exhibition explores two aesthetics of gender assignment : that of the witch and that of woven media. A visit is paid to the figure of the witch as a cunning and dangerous female character, rooted in our collective unconscious. The witch is this manipulative woman with ancient knowledge who uses black magic to lead us astray. For Johanna Rocard, the witch is a riotous woman who rebels against the established order and refuses to be silenced. She is a free woman who raises the banner of revolution and refuses to accept life if it is reduced to domination. A whole lineage of women is woven through the artist‘s installation and performance. A lineage of women who speak out and swear not to be silenced: from the witch of the late Middle Ages to the most famous rioter of the Paris Commune, Louise Michel and her black banner. If the French Revolution was probably „bourgeois“, the Paris Commune was certainly anarchist and utopian, in tune with the historical moment we are living through in the 21st century. The performative device and the installation, featuring the black flag and costumes in a time of resistance, could easily evoke the W.I.T.C.H in Wallstreet in 1968, or those in Portland in 2017, against Donald Trump‘s white-hetero-patriarchal order, the red ‚handmaids‘ marching around the world in 2018, the Iranian women brandishing the veil in 2022. Dress is at the heart of the approach, a medium of resistance, a therapeutic staging of the body whose movement clashes with the rigidity of the dominant rule. The witch is also a collective imagination to be reclaimed : that of hooked fingernails, green skin and a devouring mouth. Hélène Hulak makes them the core of her visual grammar. By working on the aesthetics of the monster, the artist‘s works speak to us about the manipulation of images and the marginality of the feminine. The devouring woman who pulls all the strings manifests herself here in two forms: a selection of fabric pieces and a mural. The fabric pieces are part of an effort to reclaim sewing as a feminine medium. As for the painting, it extends and devours the space, with no apologies for taking its place. Hélène Hulak‘s works are also fragments of the body, a body cut out, coveted, desired, devoured. Her work might remind us of the idea of the ‚absent referent‘ of the author Carole J Adams, who studies in the Sexual Politics of Meat how, in carnism, the cutting up of the animal into parts is a necessity in order to make us forget the living being that is being consumed. To go further, this concept also tells us that this same mechanism is used by the patriarchy on women‘s bodies to better justify their domination and exploitation. From then on, a thigh, a breast, a mouth are eroticized for the benefit of male desire and in the absence of the person, the woman, to whom they belong. To speak of witches is therefore also to speak of a form of capitalo-patriarchal cannibalism of the images close to what Jacques Derrida called „carnophallogocentrism“. In line with this idea, Lux Miranda‘s work attempts to free itself from the imaginations and postures of domination. The forms are the fruit of an impregnation of the world and long mediation. The artist‘s body of work tends to create what she herself calls a large „library of ecofeminist images“, in other words an imaginary world born of attention, care, the experience of the body, the experience of the margins, outside the well-trodden paths of contemporary rational capitalist society. Lux Miranda‘s work embraces what Starhawk, the Californian witch and author, calls „the power-from-within“, the power that comes from the heart, the truth that emerges from our darkest fears. The carpet as an artistic medium is a stand against a postural approach to art. Here, the works will be on the floor, will be turned over, will be both pleasant and demanding. The work encapsulates its know-how and the time devoted to it.
To conclude with the words of Silvia Federici : « We would be deceiving ourselves if we thought it didn‘t concern us (…) as soon as we strip the persecution of witches of their metaphysical trappings, we realize just how close these phenomena are to what we are experiencing, here and now. »*

** Caliban and the witch, Silvia Federici

Johanna Rocard : 1988, žije a pracuje v Rennes. Johanna Rocard zpochybňuje pojem kolektivu prostřednictvím performativních prostředků, které si vypůjčuje z rituálu. Používá estetiku, v níž se mísí čarodějnictví, šamanismus, populární festivaly a současné kontrakultury, aby zpochybnila poetiku věcí, které nás spojují, a aby vybudovala společenství proti kapitalistickému individualismu. Přivolává textilie a ozdoby. Mluvíme o odporu. „Každá akce, každé gesto, každá forma, která tvoří mou práci, má být apotropaická, což je termín, který ve staré řečtině označuje použití magie a energie k odvrácení zlých kouzel, která jsou charakteristická pro období boje a přechodu.“ Johanna Rocard.

Hélène Hulak : 1990, žije a pracuje v Lyonu. S tvorbou Hélène Hulak je čas vykřičet zkreslené a vystrčit drápky! Práce mladé umělkyně převrací kapitalistické ženské představy. Všepohlcující estetika Hélène Hulak, pro niž je charakteristická sytá chromatičnost, dlouhé zuby, vyčnívající drápy a pobuřující míry, představuje neuspořádanost jako princip. Je to jako odpověď na Picassa a reklamu: ne, dekonstrukce ženského těla nepatří erotizujícímu divákovi, od nynějška to bude odhalování emocionální síly ženy. Hélène Hulak pracuje s textilními technikami jako s příležitostí znovu si přivlastnit nevratné tvůrčí materiály a techniky, vzdálené domestikaci, která jim byla přisouzena. Autorka také zkoumá invazivitu nástěnné malby v technice naléhavosti. Barva na vodní bázi je nanášena jednoduchým gestem houby, což dílu dodává obviňující živost. Buďte opatrní a Dávejte si pozor.

Lux Miranda : 1990, Žije a pracuje v Paříži. Lux Miranda je umělkyně, která se osvobozuje od dominantních představ. Prostřednictvím meditativního přístupu k tvorbě rozvíjí mladá umělkyně to, co nazývá „knihovnou ekofeministických forem“, neboť tyto formy se neopírají o žádnou předem existující racionalitu nebo kolektivní narativ, ale spíše o vibrující zkušenost života situovanou v čase a prostoru. Luxova díla jsou bez zábran. Nabízejí nesrovnatelné hřiště pro tvary a barvy, oproštěné od jakýchkoli pokusů o institucionalizaci. Koberec působí takovou uzavřeností a měkkostí, která nijak neubírá na komplexnosti zážitku. Tvůrčí čin Lux Mirandy jí dává pozici čarodějky s vědomím předků, jako apel na nevinné nevědomí, to, které v hloubi duše ví, co cítíme, a na prvotní gesto tvorby.

Výstava v galerii Berlinskej Model je podpořena společností ARTER.