In search of clues

Identity, gender roles and memories in recent Eastern European art

Until mid-January 2010, the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg is exhibiting about 70 works by the prize-winners of the ‘Essl Art Award CEE 2009’ in an exhibition of the same name.

Artists from Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia and, for the first time, Romania are represented at the exhibition. The participants – all students from the art academies in these countries – were chosen by internet, with ten people from each country being picked to present their work at an exhibition in their own capital city. Three prize-winners from each country were then finally selected to exhibit their work in Vienna.

Role-plays and identity

The result is a varied selection of different artistic genres – from paintings and photography to videos and mixed media installations. There were also no specific guidelines concerning the theme of the works. Despite this, it is noticeable that many artists have addressed the question of identity determined by role patterns and the reconstruction of memories.

The work of the young Croatian artist Ivana Jurić, for example, focuses on role patterns. In her collages, she sets up female figures in surroundings ‘typical’ for them. The roles assigned to the women alternate between those of a mother, a lover and a career woman. The Romanian artist Violeta Ionită also concerns herself with roles. In her video, recalling fairy tales in its aesthetic approach, she shows a transsexual searching for his identity as a woman.

Physical perfection and ‘blank’ people are the material for Maruša Šuštar from Slovenia. In her paintings, she puts these people against a sort of empty surface or screen, where they wait to be ‘printed’, as it were.

Lifebuoys for humanity

The Slovakian artist Josef Poník goes back to our natural origins in his work. According to Poník, the most human time of our lives is spent in the womb. For his work, ‘navel’, the artist took plaster casts of the navels of 70 people and created a couch with them, with its red legs supposed to symbolise the violent trampling of our world. “These days, we need a lifebuoy for more humanity,” says Poník, who, for ‘lifebuoys for humanity’, attached navels to plastic lifebuoys and let these drift along on a lake. His painting, ‘big women’, is also worth a look, showing a bald-headed man with a mischievous look on his face, leaning back casually in an armchair that is actually a fat, pink woman.

Reconstructing memories

Petra Malá’s work is all about memories. With the help of personal and family memories, the Czech artist reconstructs a sort of photographic family history.

Childhood memories are also at the centre of Katarína Polačiková’s work. While her paintings involve situations into which she integrates her father – who was only present in spirit during her childhood, however – she also reconstructs the floor plans of former Slovenian apartments using sugar cubes so as to symbolise sweet transience.

The Czech artist Anna Hulačova addresses the longing for untroubled childhood. She has created a kingdom out of bath sponges which can be folded up to form a suitcase and is thus easily transported.

The Slovenian Matej Sitar leads us into the world of stories with her project, ‘Fairy Tale’. The aim behind the photographer’s work, which wavers between posed pictures and snapshots, is to arouse viewers’ curiosity and stimulate their imagination.