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Updating the danse macabre

In simple light boxes, a complex synthesis of cultures
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
January 30th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Fluttering images inside the boxes invoke restless spirits, an idea Šimlová encountered during trips to Mexico.
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Štěpánka Šimlová: Air From the Thames

at Hunt Kastner Artworks Ends March 8. Kamenická 22, Prague 7–Letná. Open Tues.–Fri. 1–6 p.m., Sat. 2–6 p.m. or by appointment; call 233 376 259

There are spirits in the air at Hunt Kastner Artworks, where Štěpánka Šimlová has a new exhibition inspired largely by the Mexican Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration.
Šimlová (born in 1969 in the west Bohemian city of Plzeň) is one of the most poetic and thoroughly engaging video and photomontage artists on the contemporary Czech scene. This show represents a departure for her.
Created specifically for the Hunt Kastner space, the installation consists of nine large light boxes with fluttering images inside, similar to the swirls of imagery seen in her videos, though lacking her usual density of color. On first impression, these images seem to have nothing to do with the Day of the Dead celebration, except that the jittering images vaguely resemble the strung-together paper cutouts of figures or patterns that are hung across rooms and altars. But there are no skeletons, skulls or flowers here, nor the joyously bright colors associated with Mexico’s upbeat and cheerful (though macabre) national holiday, celebrated in homes and cemeteries across the country.
Šimlová has experienced Dia de los Muertos firsthand on several trips to Mexico over the past few years, and she is fascinated by the Mexicans’ synthesis of pre-Columbian deities, rites and customs with the saints, demons, rites and customs of Spanish Catholicism. This unusual marriage shouldn’t be surprising to any European, as both cultures are strangely rooted in death and violence. It’s almost as if Spanish Catholic culture, with its history of ruthless inquisitions and self-destructive obsession with the occult and pagan practices, was bound to merge at some point with the Aztec culture, which has its own self-destructive history, including bloody human sacrifices.
Šimlová’s exhibition is additionally inspired by a rather long quote from the American novelist Tom Robbins, which begins: “Technology shapes psyches as well as environments, and maybe we are too sophisticated, too permanently alienated from nature, to make extensive use of our pagan heritage.” Robbins maintains that links with our past must be re-established, although he points out that “to re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development is not the same as a romantic, sentimental retreat into simpler, rustic lifestyles.” In other words, he isn’t espousing Thoreau, and he insists that Anglo-Saxons should not all rush out to become Hindus. “However, we have lost too many valuable things along the road of so-called progress, and you need to go back and retrieve them. If nothing else, to discover where you’ve been may enable you to guess at where you are going.”
With their dual inspirations, Šimlová’s light boxes dominate the gallery space, leaving no room for escape. They contain more or less similar images, but air is circulated through each one at a different rate so that their shapes and images change more rapidly or slowly. Most of the boxes are in gray tones, but several in color — one glows a faint yellow, another is serene blue, a third is pinkish-red — are literally at the heart of the show, placed at its center amid the gray-toned boxes.
The boxes covering the gallery windows breathe in silky curtains blown by a cool breeze, and glow into the room more intensely than the other boxes when the sun is shining outside.
The light boxes alternate in size, with the largest big enough to serve as coffins for the obese. They are placed symmetrically around the room. The paper cutouts are attached to netting behind a thick plastic screen. The images are blown against the screens, with the fans providing a dim background sound.
There is a look of decay through the misty screens, and some of the moving images resemble fragments of bodies or human shadows pushing up against the netting, then the screen, tapping silently. Sometimes a skeletal face may seem to appear and then vanish in a flash.
Europe has no modern counterpart to Mexico’s Day of the Dead. However, artists and artisans of the Middle Ages honored death in their own way, recreating unforgettable scenes of the danse macabre, or Dance of Death, on canvases and frescoes and in woodcuts.
“Air from the Thames” recalls this past by creating a collection of shadows, ghost figures or even dead souls in boxes, contained and struggling to get out. They are like lonely solo dancers in pristine lighted boxes, all moving in various rhythms to a modern danse macabre.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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