Familial Traces

About

FAMILIAL TRACES, 2023

This exhibition builds on the artist’s ongoing research into sensory perception, embodiment, and the liminal space where internal and external topography intertwine. It coincides with the launch of 5th issue of Tangible Territory, an open access art, science and philosophy journal, focused on themes of home and family relationships.

Women perform numerous roles. Being a daughter is one all women share. Some women are also mothers, grandmothers, or great grandmothers. The video installation explores the fluidity of these different roles, examining through a poetic language how one’s identity intertwines with the identities of others in a family genealogy, as well as one’s own past, current and future selves.

Last year marked the 10th anniversary of Stehlíková’s ongoing project 4 Generations of Women. The project has resulted in a number of short films shot over the decade, staging small family rituals involving the women in the artist’s female line. The process of performing these rituals, as well as the subsequent editing and sharing of the films, has been a way of spending time together, gathering shared memories and recording and processing experience. It is a way of centring oneself, within the process of ceaseless transformation. In this installation the imagery of the last decade is projected onto the performing women, creating a temporal collage.

Music by Irena and Vojtech Havel.

Familial Traces, frottage installation, 2023

“Remembered and forgotten, the stories of the house constantly unfold on the wall/screen. They are sculpted in the corporeality of “architexture”; exposed in the marks of duration impressed on materials; inscribed on fragments of used brick, scratched metal, or consumed wood…” Giuliana Bruno

Frottage is a playful but also tactile method, which invites one to come close to the surface of things. Taking an imprint is a way of communicating with an environment which is involved, intimate and which extends and cuts across time. It doesn’t just engage vision, or touch, but also hearing and smell. For a filmmaker interested in embodiment as well as role of time, frottage is the perfect technique of entering into a dialogue with place. It has the power to reveal invisible layers, literally as well as metaphorically. For this exhibition Stehlíková used frottage technique to trace elements of her childhood apartment: thresholds, floorboards and doorways, as well as the streets she has walked as a child. These places: rooms, staircases, streets and pavements are now part of the artist’s mental morphology.