Zorka Lednárová: Cesta mesta
In her exhibition project, Slovak sculptor and multidisciplinary artist Zorka Lednárová reflects on physical barriers and limitations that are invisible to some of us, but practically insurmountable for others. It is a topic that she has been dealing with in recent years also because she experiences it first-hand as a person with limited mobility - she talks about the will and desire for freedom, which is a universally felt value regardless of any handicap or otherness.
Galéria MEDIUM, Hviezdoslavovo nám. 18, Bratislava
Exhibition opening: 1.6.2023, 18:00
exhibition duration: 2.6. – 9.7.2023
Curator: Jana Babušiaková
An able-bodied person perceives public space differently and therefore her intention is to convey her different experience of pavements, underpasses or building entrances through the medium of painting, sculpture or video, as well as through activist guerrilla interventions or participatory engagement with different groups of the population. In doing so, she also openly presents her feelings and her desire for conditions that would allow even the people with physical condition to move around the city with dignity and independence, within the limits of their abilities. She is not afraid to name mistakes and offer functional solutions. These are written into the urban design of our cities, but what is needed for change this is, above all, a change in thinking about who uses public spaces and how they are used.
The author makes healthy individuals feel the frustration of barriers first-hand by using playful activating elements, imitating the limitations of public space. One is an action-packed obstacle course for a wheelchair in a courtyard, another one is a specially made oversized step, changing the perspective from an ordinary step, meant to be crossed, to a large obstacle.
Lednárová's profoundly humanistic statement is often accompanied by physically demanding painting with the help of her own body, the results of which she presents in the exhibition, together with video footage. The almost spiritual confrontation with her own body and the canvas in the painterly performative process of recording movement over it using archetypal language (e.g. the motif of a circle or the figure of an angel) speaks of the pain and the undeniable barriers of the ill body, but above all of the will, wholeness and freedom that the support of society enables the individual to acquire and thus overcome his or her own physical limits.
Supported using public funding by Bratislava Self-Governing Region Council and Bratislava City Foundation.
Partners: Nadácia SPP, Bittner, Belasý motýľ, Slovlak