Writing on the wall

A family home over time becomes like an additional member of the family, an intimate reflection of its inhabitants and a repository of their history and dreams. As a way of saying goodbye to her former family home, a 4+1 second-floor walk-up in an Art Nouveau building on Myslíkova street, the artist Kamila Ženatá has transformed it into a walk-through art installation.

While the rooms are no longer inhabited, traces of the artist and her family are everywhere. She has covered some of the rooms floor to ceiling with handwritten text: personal stories, memories, recalled dialogues and dreams, all written in Czech, naturally. Whether you can read it or not, the text creates a powerful atmosphere of the human lives lived there, remembered and inscribed on the plaster.

After ringing the bell, visitors are buzzed into the building and welcomed into the flat. You can begin anywhere, but a good starting point is the kitchen, which has been turned into a makeshift reception area. Small pictures are hung on the walls, along with several empty frames. A row of nails near the kitchen sink is hung with necklaces, many with a heart motif, while, behind the reception desk, the small shelves are still full. A handmade potholder hangs on the wall where family meals were once cooked.

Off the kitchen, the bathroom contains coffee-making supplies. Next to a hissing gas water-heater above the bathtub, there is a small passage of text that refers to being on the outside looking in.

On the right of the text-covered hallway leading to the main rooms of the flat is the WC, which along with text contains little paintings, empty frames and one that holds a postcard sent from a child at summer camp. Further on, another door opens to a small storage room, perhaps once used as a photo darkroom. It now holds a spare mattress, ladder and sundries - the only place in the flat that does not seem to be part of the installation.

A set of padded double doors, with the inscription "probably here," leads to a bedroom where white dropcloths cover a bed and also a TV set on an ironing board. Several paintings on the text-covered walls depict the same young girl, always seen from the back - gazing toward the horizon, looking out over a city at night - except for one in which she is caught mid-movement, swinging around to face the viewer. There are also several paintings of a teenage boy in warrior-like poses with various weapons. Amid the artist's text, a child's hand has copied William Blake's poem "The Tyger" on the wall and decorated it with a simple moon and stars and a postscript: "Goodnight tonight."

Resist any temptation to open the other set of doors (a calamity of toppled paintings could ensue), and exit back into the hallway, leading to the heart of the installation.

Diffused window light filters through translucent white fabric into what was apparently the family living room, now a lucid forest of various small objects hanging from the ceiling, many coated in whitewash. There are remnants of daily life (a shoe insole, a drain strainer, a light bulb), items collected from nature (dried flowers and long blades of grass) and objects that invoke memory (photo negatives, old keys, Christmas ornaments) and dreams (a dream-catcher). Fragile items like snail shells and an egg are spread across the floor.

A set of doors on the left leads into a small room that will either be dark or lit up, depending on when you step into it. Filled with a jumble of around 20 paintings, primarily of people, and with clothes still on hangers, it is like a fragmented dream that reels though the past and present: a bride being carried over the threshold, a young mother holding a baby, an aging mother, an older couple perhaps celebrating a wedding anniversary. As the lights cycle off, a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark paint dabs and plastic stars are revealed. Each time the lights come back on, they seem to reveal more details. In the corner of this room infused with family history, a passage of Czech text reads: "Have the bravery to leave, have the bravery not to have it, said my brother and faintly smiled."

On leaving this room, you walk gingerly around white fabric on the floor to the final room, where three videos are running: of a girl in a diaphanous white gown, slowly dancing in an open field; a young man practicing martial arts in a park; and vintage footage of a just-married couple, like the figures from the paintings in the previous room have come to life. The first two videos play across a predominantly white painting of foliage, while the third covers the window, creating a photographic positive and negative effect.

Throughout these rooms, there is a recurring sense of dichotomy: between light and dark, beginning and ending, a longing to return to a safe place but also to venture out into unknown territory. This unique installation is a stirring love letter to the walls, doors and windows that embrace a family and over time become an integral part of its identity.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com