Artists: Matěj Frank and Jasmin Schaitl
Title: Entering Continuities
Venue: Pragovka Gallery Entry
Curator: Jakub Frank
Photo: Marcel Rozhoň
03.12.2019 – 15.01.2020
By entering the continuity, we do not disrupt it – we become part of it.
At the very first exhibition of entering continuities in 2017, Matěj Frank and Jasmin Schaitl introduced their projects based on uncompleted processes, capturing information and collecting and saving specific artistic material. By doing that, they developed a method that has established a characteristic direction in their cooperative work ever since. It stems from both authors’ attitudes and their relationship, but it also naturally connects their interest in performance, drawing and line, as well as layering and preserving traces of creative processes. The characteristic elements are their unfinished state and continuous growth. The most important thing here is the process itself – when the artistic material is added, the work gains significance and independence.
To Schaitl and Frank, those projects are means to create and capture their common memory – memory of places, time and lived space – to put it simply: to create a diary (deník). The diary is created as a reaction to the constant movement and travels of both authors and from the lack of time they spend together. Despite using the form of diary entries with precise dates and places, the map and the timeline this data creates is just a supporting element of the whole project. The essential moment for the authors remains in their meetings and coexistence. At the same time, natural chronological order is disturbed as the common memory is created only by moments the artists spend together – the in-between is not captured. However, highlighting these individual elements is not important in this project – what matters is that they become a continuity.
The individual diary entries have strictly defined rules. Every day the artists spend together, they create a drawing. They outline each other’s feet on a tracing paper of the same format and numerate it. This way of recording through a simple gesture only becomes significant when it is repeated and consequently presented as a whole project. Each specific installation of the drawings enables us to interpret the records and to read the artwork in its complexity. For Pragovka Gallery, the diary project is presented together with the walking videos series, which focuses on exploring the authors’ attitudes towards the lived space. A camera is aimed only on the authors’ legs going one after another. This captures only a fragment of the surrounding the authors walk through. From this very limited perspective (de facto from one of the authors’ point of view), we can watch the landscape changing as well as changing of the weather conditions and seasons. On the one hand, the videos create counterpoint to the diary which is oriented rather on the time memory; on the other hand, they complete the diary with the artists’ own perspective that is suppressed in the diary at the expense of conceptual objectivity.
The most important continuity in this project is thus the memory – not in a sense of fragmentary memories, but more in a sense of overall lived space with all the events entering and influencing it. The purpose is to preserve this memory and observe the traces that are left in a continuity before they dissolve.
