The Underbelly of a Lost Hat
curated by: Mia Milgrom, Natálie Kubíková
artists:
Josefin Arnell, David Čumalo, Tobias Izsó, Jolana Škachová, Maximilian Haja, Jakub Hájek & František Hanousek
15.4. - 2.6. 2024
A humble object such as a hat can unveil hidden narratives of loss and identity. The performative act of taking off a hat symbolizes a moment of uncovering a mystery, exposing the unseen and vulnerable underside, the soft underbelly often linked to overlooked or disregarded societies, memories, things that stay in the dark. Everything one wears eventually deteriorates and therefore is dematerialized from our perceived realities. Garments become like shedded skins, they are left behind as forgotten carriers of stories. All that is left for us to see through the cracked doors of an old cabinet is a tip of a hanging gray coat, an orange knit hat and trousers lifelessly lying on the ground. In their state of potentiality, these objects function as traces - as opposed to fixed entities, they generate the possibility of new forms and multiplicities of relating.
David Čumalo’s works titled “Oblivion” walk a fine line between painting, objects and architecture. By recycling old closets from his grandparents house and using them as his canvases, he keeps certain memories alive and adds new layers onto them. Any difference between the object and its shadow is left unrecognized, maintaining a spatial fiction that allows for continuing care and intimacy. In dialogue with drawings by Jolana Škachová, they compose a collection of missing parts. Škachová’s “Pillars” and “Supportlessly” are both carefully layered, each pencil color blends into the next, the total exposing the potential of its individual coats. The narrative stories and figurative motifs thus become merged in one surface, one landscape. Tobias Izsó’s works extend this dialogue in which materials play a game of mimicry while accentuating the non-reducible interactions between them. Using assemblage to piece together fragments of domestic life, he works both figuratively and object-based. Izsó researches the materiality of wood, each time deliberately learning a different craft method used mainly in decorative furniture design. The question of the familiar or domestic simultaneously addresses “worn-out clichés and the familiar comfort of petit bourgeois existence”.
Within the framework of surface abstraction, Maximilian Haja works with a series of prints titled “Whole New World” in which he deconstructs individual images and then fragments them into points, lines, surfaces and shadows. The works on view are prints of original jacquard panels from the artist’s graduate exhibition, in which he responds to the Apocalypse Tapestry, a large medieval set of tapestries commissioned in Paris between 1377 and 1382 by Louis I, Duke of Anjou. Haja uses visuals of photographs from history, pop culture and film, historicizing their content and seeking out the heroic gestures of Western culture, then breaking them down into contrasted shadows and dissected squares.
Josefin Arnell’s fantasy film “Buurthuis 2” asks what it means “to be a good citizen in the context of increasing wealth disparity, housing shortages, and welfare cuts.” The play with theatrical absurdity and a humorous engagement with the pathetic rules of society, is a process of breaking away from the pre-defined, as a form of provocative resistance. The film is produced together with the community centre De Witte Boei in the Wittenburg district of Amsterdam. The script and the subsequent filming of the film were developed in workshops led by Arnell. The room also houses hand-woven wire sculptures by Jakub Hájek and František Hanousek, who form an artistic duo. The abandoned tea set and old cheese make us question who instigates change and why they often stay concealed in the underbellies.