Exhibiting artists: Hynek Alt, Petra Feriancová, Adrián Kriška, Marie Lukáčová, Martin Maeller, Ruth Novaczek, Anni Puolakka & Ellie Rae Hunter, P Staff, Iveta Schovancová
Floor is Lava, an international group exhibition borrows its title from an eponymous children’s game common in the Western context, in our geopolitical environment familiarized by computer games and reality TV adaptations. Basically, since the floor is lava, one needs to walk only on objects above the ground. The idea of a game where one needs to jump from place to place, constantly avoiding obstacles and completely redefining rules of engagement with one’s environment, serves as a direct metaphor for the clashes between conservative heteropatriarchal societal settings and current critical feminist and queer discourses.
Critically deconstructing and reevaluating layers and layers of hard-encoded traditional ways of seeing, being, feeling, and relating to one another is often like walking on burning lava with no cooling islands to escape. The exhibition is not attempting to formulate a complex image of the problem, mainly because such an image doesn’t exist and never will, since it is, out of principle, in constant flux, elusive and unattainable. Therefore the show focuses on little glimpses of the overall idea of such a fluid mental image. Following specifically, issues of unlearning biases relating to aging, dying, being in pain, mothering, conjointly existing within non-normative communities, queering, and embracing the uncertainty of endless fluidity.
Denis Kozerawski & Jen Kratochvil