NA HRANE / AT THE LIMIT / AM LIMIT
12.10. - 26.11. 2023
Galerie Gong
Ruská 2993, Ostrava,
Ruská 2993, Ostrava,
Česká Republika
Artists:
Silvia Beck, Francisco Klinger Carvalho, Alexandra Holownia, Chan Sook Choi, Nadine Fecht, Pavel Forman, Viktor Frešo, Martin Juef, Martin Kocourek, Tomáš Koudela, František Kowolowski, Zorka Lednárová, Luciana Magno, Matthias Mayer, Falk Nordmann, Armando Queiroz, Monika Rechsteiner, Nina E. Schönefeld, Bignia Wehrli, Markus Wirthmann
Special Guests: Milan Dobeš, Julio Le Parc, Bridget Riley
Gong Gallery in Ostrava presents the international exhibition project At the Limit /
Am Limit, which explores the experience of border situations against the backdrop of works by nineteen artists from six countries.
The curators of the exhibition, Martin Juef, Zorka Lednárová and Tomáš Koudela, refer to the personal and social contexts that emerge within the exhibition through a selection of works, especially in the field of border experience or transgressive conditions created on the basis of artistic approaches. In general, boundaries mark inner and outer space and create the contours of existential behaviour. Boundaries are dynamic and therefore never finite - only death constitutes a final boundary. According to Karl Jaspers, experiences in liminal situations lead to inner
changes that favor "the being of a possible existence within us!
The range of artworks in the exhibition at Gong Gallery extends from a broader reconstruction of the actual moment of death to a chemical experiment in which one can observe a salt solution and its gradual crystallization. Another artwork projects today's ecological and geopolitical problems into a virtual future scenario. We also see portrait photographs embedded in containers that disintegrate in water, as part of research on the eviction and discrimination of Japanese women in Korea after World War II. In addition, we are confronted with a gender-specific stereotype that has its origins in early psychoanalysis. The construction of metal bars presents the possibility of changing the perspective from the inside and the outside. We watch as the camera moves across the ruined concrete of a nuclear power plant that was never commissioned, or we encounter the artistic figure of Viola Kamp, an agent and doppelganger, whom we observe performing her art form. Elsewhere, we encounter a convolute of coloured drawings whose individual sheets are reflected in pairs on the side edges, making the depicted motifs into abstract patterns.
We will meet the legendary King Midas, who will feast on bugs before our eyes. You'll get a glimpse of the secret Candomblé ritual, in which dancers in trance give their bodies to to the ears of their gods. Expressive oil paintings celebrate the fusion of man and beast. In the lush vegetation of the tropical rainforest, the female nude is transformed into a plant creature. We observe an artistic attempt to express new evolutionary paths or bio-extensions, where the boundaries between man and nature intermingle and enrich each other. For example, we will also see a shape depicting an object/story and its meaning as a heart made of a sharp-edged saw blade.
