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JIRI KOVANDA
Born Prague (Czech Republic), 1953. Lives and works in Prague.
Kissing Through a Glass, 2007
Performance
Courtesy of the GB gallery agency, Paris
From the middle of the 1970s, Jiri Kovanda carried out discreet, interventional actions in Prague which were almost impossible to distinguish from real life; walking in the street and brushing passers-by, running away in the middle of an argument, waiting for the telephone to ring, making appointments and arriving late... His work, which is as poetic as it is political (and reminiscent perhaps of Bas Jan Ader or Douglas Huebler), returns to the existential question of the place of the individual within social space. It cannot however, be reduced to a contextual reaction brought about by the situation of Eastern European countries during the Soviet period. His political stance concerns the preservation of an integration of the individual at the heart of society, and a relation with others based on the paradox of a desire for contact and the insurmountable difficulty of communication. The particular economy of his work – a modesty in the setting and realization of the performance, a universality and immediacy – produces work of profound romanticism and subtle humour. Recently, after having dedicated himself to more satirical works of painting and sculpture in the 1990s, he has returned to performance. Kissing Through a Glass is an example of the ethic and economy of the artistic gesture, between self-restraint and exhibition, desire and separation, humour and pain.
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