Fotograf Gallery

The figure of the measurer is inseparably tied to the modern cultural tradition, particularly from the 19th century onwards. A male figure moves through the landscape, and on his back lies the “weight” of the precise measurement of reality. One of the ways in which photography became historically most useful was as a tool of scientific measurement, where it was to ensure the desired precision and objectivity. Measurement, often aided by photographic technologies, thus plays an essential role in modernity and bears a similar load. The world must first be measured so that it can be cut up and sold.

Flesh, meat, skin and leather: different names to describe similar assemblages of cellular tissue. The exhibition reflects on the making and unmaking of bodies and identi- ties, through the reproduction, fabrication and extraction of biological matter. Playing with the fluidity between the naturally procreated and the artificially engineered, The Never E-ending Egg articulates bodies and identities as territorial building materials.

Water is fluid, it does not respect boundaries, it overflows, it seeps, it represents a frightening depth, but also a soothing float on a calm surface. We can be inspired by water, and feel the power of its flow in our own bodies, or learn to receive and give in the rhythm of the waves. Heart Seas, the title of Lucie Sceranková’s exhibition – in which water becomes a metaphor for the experience of motherhood, life energy, the foam of days, a cleansing bath, but also a mirror of lived experience – is taken from a book by British anthropologist Veronica Strang, who describes the inner sea that flows through the heart and sustains its tides.

The casting from a mould gains a new shape that for a long time existed only as a possibility, it is similar to when a newly planted tree grows from a hole which forms and deforms its roots. Layers of paint, as well as lace curtains, prevent us in seeing that which would like to force its way to the surface. That “something” which remains partially hidden, is one of the motives of works by both artists connected with the Memory and Desire, Stirring exhibition.