Prague, December 7 – January 15, 2016, http://trafogallery.cz
Trafo Gallery is located within a warehouse and street market district (Holesovicka trznice). The way there leads past street stalls selling cheap clothes, food and other daily necessities.
Mark Ther is a well-known face of the Czech art scene. A few years ago he has been awarded the annual Czech Artist Prize (Jindrich Chalupecky Award). Usually one associates his name with a very specific kind of video art movies that display a very sensible, almost fetishistic approach to images, especially in the treatment of close-ups. There is also a thematic delineation, as Ther often includes subtle hints towards queer aesthetics and towards the complicated Czech-German relationships of the 20th century. Both of these themes are based on his personal experience and family background.
This exhibition built on the thematic and formal elements of Ther’s video works, but transferred them into the form of a drawing- and print-based installation. As in his movies, the approach stood out with its great attention to the smallest installation details. The drawings themselves built on the pastoral motives of Czech-German borderlands that appeared in his videos previously. The press release was very cryptic, talking about the “fragmented and fragile inner landscapes that only exist in rough outlines, in memories that only reveal certain motives.” As far as I understood, the landscape drawings were based on old sketches created during WW2 by one of Ther’s relatives from the German side of his family who fought in the war.
The counterpart to this exhibition in the Chinese context would probably be the artworks referring to the Cultural Revolution period, like Ye Funa’s restaging of her parent’s revolutionary photographs (or any of the thousand more examples). There is a sense of nostalgia for the past and a bittersweet feeling for things lost. The amount of historical reflexivity of WW2 in Europe is of course incomparably higher, and that allows Ther to take a much more subtle and highly aesthetic approach to such an extent that instead of discussing the referenced subject matter, the final artwork comes across as a tangible representation a specific feeling for and imagination of a historical period close to the artist’s heart.
Mark Ther