29,7 x 21,3 cm
Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph. Contrarily to the actions, he took the photographs himself. One of the rules he stuck to in his artistic practice was to always use material at his disposal, a real economy of means. Since he worked in the Prague National Gallery store between 1977 and 1995, he was able to use left-over art handling materials like string, paper, wooden wedges and so forth. Most interventions tended to be small in scale and ephemeral, with no particular audience since they occurred outside the art gallery space (certainly until the late 1990s). The white piles on two parallel bridges are bound to disappear. This poetic installation in urban settings is given two different perspectives, one photograph being a close-up. Kovanda states that: “They were often white… Maybe it had something to do with that out of place quality I was talking about. On the street, for example, the color white seems rather artificial. It provides a certain contrast.”
Jiri Kovanda was born in 1953 in Prague, Czech Republic. He lives and works in Prague.
The film The Anatomy Classroom is part of a research project developed by Hikaru Fujii around objects and artifacts evacuated from the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore, which is located in the “difficult-to-return zone” since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident...
Weekly Picks: Singapore (24 - 30 September 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do September 25, 2018 鞭爱 Oedipus by Toy Factory Productions Toy 肥料厂 , NOWPlaying@17, 17A Smith Street, 21, 22, 28, 29 Sep 2018 鞭爱 Oedipus by Toy Factory Productions presents the case of a senseless murder where a severely disabled man Wang Jia Hao has whipped his 50 year old mother to death...
About, for, and to #2 – Joan Naviyuk Kane, Poetry Reading Saturday, February 19, 2022 In conjunction with the exhibition Gala Porras-Kim, Precipitation for an Arid Landscape at Amant, poet Joan Naviyuk Kane reads from her latest book Dark Traffic (2021), in which she focuses on landscape, climate change, and indigenous identity...
Kovanda’s street interventions are always documented according to the same format as the actions: a piece of A4 paper, a typewritten text giving a precise location and date, and a photograph...
Kovanda’s ‘discreet’ actions (leaving a discussion in a rush, bumping into passers-by in the street, making a pile of rubbish and scattering it, looking at the sun until tears come…) are always documented according to the same format: a piece of A4 paper, a concise typewritten text, and sometimes a photograph taken by someone else...
This ephemeral installation by Jirí Kovanda, documented in the same way as his performances with a photograph and a text, belongs to a body of works that took place in his apartment/studio...
In the video Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black...
In the video Blanco sobre Blanco (White on White) , we see a white man appearing in a white screen embedded into a white wall— alluding to Malevich’s White on White series...
In a style that is unique of Tokoudagba, he evokes the kings, gods and their symbols related to the earth, water, air and fire, usually on a white background...