post-absurdum
Klara Kusa’s solo exhibition post-absurdum serves as a register of the appearances of various modes of things in different stages of visibility. These elements emerge from the indistinct space between the idea of a library and an archive, generated not only in the artist’s mind but also through the interpretative experience of perceptive viewers. This creates a performative situation built on the artist’s hybrid strategies of conceptual art and photography.
The intervention involves both images and objects, the latter composed of deconstructed books and their spines-traces of their origin and content. We enter the “encapsulated” intimate space of the gallery alongside the artist, who understands public artistic expression as a repetition of the ritual of appropriation, one with the potential to transform both the appropriator and the appropriated simultaneously. Repetition extends ad absurdum, reaching the threshold of the absurd, the incongruous, the deranged, the edge of the unfathomable, the lost, and the fragmented.
The prefix post- (as is often the case) subtly alters the meaning of the original term, pointing to a condition in which meaning has passed away or is no longer relevant or valid. Paradox is embedded in Klára Kusá’s approachmarked by doubt, inconclusiveness, and even trepidation. This is reflected in her exploration of emptiness, nothingness, and the indeterminate, most notably in her ruins of books, which function as post-absurd organisms of the post-world.
Lucia G. Stach, curator
Site-specific installation, ink and marker drawings, appropriated materials including maps, scanned book spines, photographs and torn pages from books found in the underground of the City Library in Bratislava, book covers, wood, stones (Certain objects, such as glasses or a watch, were already present in the gallery space).
Flatgallery, Bratislava, Slovakia, 2023
Site-specific installation featuring scans of book spines printed on fine art paper, marker drawings, photographs, and torn pages from books.
Galerie Fakulty Umění (GAFU), Ostrava, Czech Republic, 2023
