Monika Hniková: Dyáda

We are inviting you to the exhibition Dyáda by Monika Hniková, curated by Matěj Lipavský.

opening of the exhibition: 03/12/2024 at 6 p.m.
exhibition: 03/20 – 04/09/2024

“Marble is heavy, stone is hard, wood is unyielding. Forms are used, rid of their old meaning, flooded with dead symbols. They have lost their emotional strength.”

Étienne Hajdú: Myšlenky moderních sochařů (1957), translate Zdeňka Volavková-Skořepová

Perception is the ocean of our body, the constant mystery through which we live. Just as bottomless as it was a thousand years ago, as it is at any time. We read that the number of neurons in our brain is close to the number of stars in the Milky Way, and the number of interactions that take place when “merely” looking at a white wall is enormous. Add in the fact that every second, we also perceive through the prism of our entire past experience; a veritable library of entries, notions, clichés (both our own and adopted), memories, and relationships. It might seem that any attempt to articulate and literally materialise this holistic, transformative self-experience is vanity itself. And yet sometimes, a piece of plaster, a patch of spilt motor oil, a brushstroke, a plaster cast of a surface can bring this entire ocean of internal meanings to someone else. A chunk of plaster or the stroke of a brush can become an entry code without words, through which these inexhaustible riches begin to speak to us, branching into further interactions, vaster than the Milky Way, greater than the multiplying number of grains of sand on a chess board. Coming alive in someone else.

Because there is also feeling that whatever we leave only for ourselves is only half alive. Only in some form of dyad; of sharing, does everything come alive fully. We acquire a voice, expression, diction, mirroring, echo. We are obsessed with clinical precision, which is why we are often so disturbed by the other never perceiving us precisely. They will read another story, get lost in translation, see only themselves, once again. Is it all in vain, then, and communication is an illusion? I believe that keeping alive the hope that true communication is, after all, possible in some form is one of the crucial tasks of art. To attempt the impossible. What’s more, I am increasingly convinced that this is art’s only defining feature. Art can look like anything; be anything, but it cannot give up on this . As soon as our activity resigns on attempting the impossible, it ceases being art and becomes a decoration; a product. A strong lesson in this regard is the portrait, especially the portrait of a beloved. When you attempt such a portrait, you discover that actualising everything you feel, see, and perceive is impossible. I believe that this moment of full realisation is an excellent opportunity to continue in this endeavour.

The work of Monika Hniková is a dyad, a long-term collaboration with an unexpected confluence of events and the natural physical properties of materials. Motor oil, her favourite colour, rises through plaster, capillary action drags it along the transforming horizon of a landscape. This is work with various degrees of direction. A cooperation of effort and chance towards a suspected expression. The free being of things, unweighted by our interventions and ambitions, has its strength and beauty. How to enter and intervene only lightly, leaving the materials their efficacy and language, and yet working with them intentionally? To give someone the wheel does not mean not knowing or suspecting where I am going. It only means that perhaps, we need not be in such a rush.

The project is implemented with financial and material support from the State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic and Knauf Praha s.r.o.

Graphic design: Soňa Pavlík Juríková