Beáta Gerbocová, Simona Janišová, Soňa Kabaňová: My breath is part of the pulsating universe

Rosenfeld Palace in Žilina
City of Žilina
Urban Culture Žilina

Curator Viera Kleinová

Can a tame metaphor turn into a conflict? Where is the edge beyond which our quasi-certainties and experiences overflow, where is the boundary beyond which we refuse to serve the already extruded portions of reality? What is our horizon of vulnerability? In their diverse media perspectives, Beáta Gerbocová, Simona Janišová and Soňa Kabaňová relate to the questions raised, especially in the experience of motherhood. They think about how their life paths are transcribed into artistic creation, they explore their ambitions, dilemmas and attitudes reconfigured by the ambivalence of the position of mother-artist. They perform with the image of their childish/juvenile self and consider its reflection in their children. They lead us along the paths of private formative liminalities, they think about moments of critical social transitions – like Simona Janišová in her work My Feet – an intuitive and precise commentary on our radically shaken present.

Maria Bartuszová, whose diary excerpt gave the exhibition its name, enters the authors’ perspective with her vital concept of thinking with matter, a perceptive and unconditional situating of the kinship of the body, nature and art. In their artistic and design practice of ceramics, porcelain, textiles and jewellery, Soňa, Beáta and Simona work with the temporality of natural processes, seek transformative arguments for unstable, fragmented, hybrid bodies, and challenge the static, conformal position of material disciplines. Their negotiations polemicize with the homogeneous and hierarchically organized ties of craft, art, and design – they contextualize material memory and weaving as a temporal process (Beáta Gerbocová), seek responsibility and resilience in the ephemera of degraded beauty (Soňa Kabaňová), morph in a network of experiments referring to the polyvalence of clay, the weight of the archetype, and the courage to enter heterogeneous environments with ceramics (Simona Janišová).