Given the current age of constant image circulation, traces of their origin and authorship are increasingly lost. Unambiguous meanings are dissolving, branching and obscuring interpretative paths. The exhibition Second Perspective, in which the work of the artist tandem Věra Lukášová and Markéta Lisá is rearranged and remixed many times, also alludes to this phenomenon. Themselves being the subjects, they pursue a found footage kind of project, rediscovering and re-structuring found images, texts, but also memories and related feelings. Like reading the titles on the spines of books in our own library which have been grouped together over time. Even when we know them, it is as if we are (always) encountering them for the first time, and their more or less random proximity offers us unexpectedly compelling connections of meaning. Second Perspective is therefore an opportunity to enjoy the poetics of repetition, which creates a new, unique message. However, the exhibition does not offer direct clues for decoding these references, it does not want to navigate the viewer towards a clear point or lesson. It is a vibrant and crystal lyricism that leaves open space for the reader/viewer to complete the whole. The resulting film and all its parts can thus be, for some, a poem about closeness and disappearance, as well as a lyrically committed psalm about interspecies balance. Yet imprecision and misunderstanding are a welcome part of the reading.
The two-channel stereo projection in asynchronous loop is not easy to compare with the previous projects of this artist duo, not because it deviates from them so much (the manuscripts are easily recognizable), but rather because the principle of recycling is related to the identity of one of the authors. The author has reused his former pseudonym, Věra Lukášová, under which he used to perform as a VJ many years ago. The whole constellation can be interpreted as Věra Lukášová recycling the work and authorship of Filip Cenek, in collaboration with Markéta Lisa.
The principal material that is being recycled is personal memory, the history of archives and working methods, from various forms of re-editing, creation of asynchronous loops, to subtitling, quoting and authorial writing, natural soundtracks, or thematizing civility and timelessness. While film images and text passages are similar to those we know from Filip Cenek's previous work, the current exhibition has a different technical or rather media nature. We are not presented with a carousel installation or a monochromatic image, i.e. an installation and media conceptualization.
The digital image, color, "ordinary" projectors or TV screens have a symptomless and civil effect, providing more space for mutual dialogue. We therefore perceive Markéta Lisá's themes and language in the same way, her respectful fascination with plants and animals and her ability to look at the world as if for the first time, but without childlike credulity. As much as it is proposed to place these themes under the current discourse of posthumanist thinking, this interpretation is not formulated in a direct and demonstrative way, rather it zigzags rhizomatically in the threads of the metaphors at work. The neglect of one's own authorship and "trademark" and the creation of a collaborative work can also be seen as an experimental model of a survival manual, where an anarchist revolution and domination is not needed to establish a new order, but rather another perspective - the second perspective of looking at the already existing structure. Second Perspective by Věra Lukášová and Markéta Lisá is not an explicit manifesto for a better tomorrow, it is a movement, a discovery, mistakes and doubts, an incompatibility of two languages and yet an understanding.
Second Perspective
two-channel stereo projection
asynchronous loop 4-7 min.
undated
