Lenka Vítková

📍 Venue → Hospital

English version of voice-over by: Ewelina Vlček, Daniel Vlček

A rare installation of texts, audio, and video forms Lenka Vítková’s The Gravitation, a modest example of poetic elements in daily life accruing together as material for contemplation. The subject of the video and audio that the artist chose could deliberate on some of the most debilitating topics to discuss, such as suicide or euthanasia. Vítková, however, offers no evidence for such an interpretation; the linkage of one meaning to another is purely accidental. The alternative is to create a collage of another world where the universality of things such as gravity is self-twisted: What if it is love? The sudden turn of feasibility in these fragments considers the ethical dimension of enduring dysfunction and dystopia. As Vítková puts together these factors—“bad examples”—she disambiguates the outcome of reading the work and offers the virtue of discomfort in her disorganized fiction.

Lenka Vítková (*1975) is a visual artist living in Prague. Her practice includes the creation of painted canvases or small plaster objects and fragmentary texts and installations. She is interested in interweaving personal themes with cosmic perspectives and seeing the whole in lost fragments. She has recently published her texts and paintings in the artist book The First Book of Emblems (Brno: Fait Gallery, 2022). Her texts have been included in the anthologies Sorting Words (eds. M. Kubačáková and O. Buddeus, Prague: tranzit.cz, 2016) and Animal Touch (eds. H. Janečková and E Koťátková, Prague: ArtMap, 2021). Together with Anne-Claire Barriga, Filip Cenk, and Markéta Lisa, she publishes the Czech-French poetry zine Mamka. In addition to exhibitions of her own work, she has carried out several curatorial projects and from 2006 to 2010 curated a space for contemporary art in Olomouc called simply 36.

Installation view (c) Jonáš Verešpej