Kateřina Šedá – *1977

This book brings together the first complete survey of projects by the Czech artist Kateřina Šedá (b. 1977). The artist’s book is in the form of a box containing 10 folders which completely document each project (diagrams, graphs, drawings, texts, photographs, questionnaires) that Kateřina Šedá carried out from 1999–2007.

Kateřina Šedá bases her work on the observation of ‘invisible’ contexts and social relationships between individuals in her most immediate surroundings – within her family and her birthplace, Ponětovice, a village in the Moravian countryside. The observations she makes (in the form of drawings, texts and diagrams) then prompt a series of assignments, tasks and games which she carries out in those surroundings.

For example, her ‘society game’ called Nic tam není [There’s Nothing There] (2003), involved the participation of all the inhabitants of Ponětovice. Based on observations she made, she created a universal ‘Regime for a Day’ – an ordinary Saturday in a Moravian village. After cajoling her fellow villagers for some time, she was able, one Saturday, to get them to synchronise all their activities according to the regime she devised for the day, doing all the same things at the same times throughout the day. Kateřina Šedá also collaborated on several projects with her grandmother. In the project It Doesn’t Matter (2005), her grandmother created several hundred drawings from memory, documenting the objects she had sold at the household goods shop where she’d worked her whole life.