Jana Kapelová

NYLON RELATIONS

opening  April 28 / 2017 / 18:30
April 29 – May 30 /2017
curator  Eliška Mazalanová
architect of the exhibition Anton Čierny
design Pavlína Fichta Čierna

In her art, Jana Kapelová often focuses on the issues of work, self-fulfillment and alienation, the workings and relationships within art scene taken as a specific community. Besides that, her works have clearly defined aims – to contribute to a positive social change through personal emancipation.

The actual exhibition deals with the precarisation in the area of culture and art – it explores the situation of economic and social insecurity implicated by unsteady work and insufficient pay. Jana Kapelová turned to her colleagues, the women among artists, art historians and curators, and asked them to write down and share their work experiences and describe their current work situation as it weighs on their private lives. These personal testimonies, with all their subjectivity and deformed though immediate perception, aren’t motivated only by a need to disclose and publicise the unpleasant reality but also by the desire to express the general views of women working in culture. At first, it may seem as a pure complaining, unproductive fault-finding and passive pining at both suffered injustice and their own failures. Through a collective performance, though, she creates a space for awareness of the shared situation and self-reflection by comparison and by shared fellowship, i.e. the self-reflection that provides the emancipatory potential of becoming an active subject.

Nylon Relations, too, puts stress on performativity – the formation of one’s own attitude or identity through embodiment and verbalisation. But it is a hallmark of Jana Kapelová’s work in general; that’s why she appropriates the term “small stage form” when talking about her approach to performance based on the recitation of the written word.

Performing the accounts compiled into fictitious dialogues highlights the relations that are generally known but are usually ignored. The only attention they draw yields only a weak critique and almost no endeavour to do something about them. One can usually find them in the culture but also in other areas where the work is motivated by self-fulfillment rather than by making a living. They stress the gender aspect of the problematic operation of the art world as a feminised area with its marginalisation and pay inequality.

There is a similar paradox when we try to better the society but the unbearable conditions such as poorly paid or unpaid work, working on short-term projects and with uncertain funding are accepted as a natural and stable part of the system, i.e. the system that glamorizes and enforces individualism and competition at the expense of a positive social consensus.

The exhibition is the first event of Centrum Ciachovňa Arzenal, a recently established space for contemporary art in Žilina. Through presentation and support of contemporary visual art, its goal is to represent strong platforms for opinions, bring a constructive scrutiny of the cultural and social environment, support collaboration and dialogue and have an impact in a wider trans-regional space. CCA is going to operate in the industrial space of former steam power plant in Žilina provided by Museum of Art Žilina. CCA was initiated by Pavlína Fichta Čierna and Anton Čierny.

(translated by Pavol Fabuš)