MOVING HORIZONTS. THE INTRA-ACTION OF VIKA SHUMSKAYA AND ZUZANA KRIŽALKOVIČOVÁ

White paint spreads organically over the canvas, organic forms evolve, little dots of paint build small islands of white and blue, demarcating borders between different colors: Is this the planet earth from bird’s eye perspective? Black meets blue shades into grey, nuances of various colors form a rectangular frame. How do materials and colors react to one another, how do they interfere and correspond? Vika Shumskaya explores characteristics of colors and expands the notion of painting to a matter of materiality and meaning: “time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action”[1], writes feminist theorist Karen Barad. We can observe how colors materially come into existence on the painting’s surface, simultaneously, cartographies emerge: meaning evolves from materiality. Probably, you see landscapes, maybe someone else identifies cartographies, while the dripped dots might simply originate from a creative process of chance. In this regard, Shumskaya’s painterly practice offers the possibility to reflect on one’s own horizon: How do we see, from here? “From the cosmos they will not see us” is the title of this series of paintings, which indicates the desire to hide but at the same time implies the restrictiveness of one’s own horizon, built upon an individual point of view. We can take Shumskaya’s art works as an invitation to move our individual horizon and expand towards the intra-action of matter and meaning into a shared horizon of experience.

The contemporary horizon of shared experience, characterized by communication and the overflow of media coverage, increasingly relies upon matters of connectivity and electricity. Storage devices, transmitters, and hard drives are at the core of this immense apparatus. Everyday life runs on technical fundaments that are often conceived as annoying necessities but remain unseen as visual and material objects. Zuzana Križalkovičová focuses on such neglected objects and materials: In her series of works entitled „The invisible visible”, she incorporates switchboards and transfers them into an artistic context. Yellow, red, blue, green are the elementary colors of Križalkovičová’s board-paintings, bringing to mind the subtractive CMYK-color model, which is mainly used for color printing but simultaneously describes the printing process itself. Black rectangles structure Križalkovičová’s composition and help the viewer’s eyes to move through the work of art. Perception is a matter of navigation: suddenly, the whole artwork evokes the association of a map, an underground map to navigate through the metro-net of a city comes to mind. Such moments of orientation and cartography also appear in Križalkovičová’s series of light boxes. Collages of x-rays are colorfully lit, blinking and changing colors minute after minute, while the black rectangles remain static and highlight various bones and body parts. Again, the own point of view becomes tangible: How do we see each other, from here?

Horizons move when we move from one city to another, when we travel from one country to another, when we transition from one state of perception to another. In the exhibition of Vika Shumskaya and Zuzana Križalkovičová, visitors are invited to move their horizons towards the emergence, which Karen Barad trenchantly situates “between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future”[2].

Dr. phil. Hannah Bruckmüller

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council

[1] Barad, Karen: Meeting The Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham & London: Duke University Press 2007.

[2] Ibid.