CT / The Law

Curatorial text: The Law  

Kostka Gallery
Opening: 27th July 2017, 7 pm
Exhibition Duration: 27th July – 27th August 2017 
Artists: Jana Babincová, Pavla Nešverová
Curators: Eva Riebová, Jaro Varga    

The joint project of visual artist Jana Babincová and graphic designer and former conservatoire student – organ player Pavla Nešverová interconnects text, music and image in a monumental audiovisual installation. Zákon / The Law is a complex composition. Its authors make use of paradoxical connection between coincidence and intuition on the one hand with a premeditated order whose principles they had outlined themselves. Similarly to an improvised music having its given rules (rhythm, key) that hold the variations of individual players together, so does the collaboration of Jana a Pavla have its determined laws, which form the ground for improvisation and intuition to be applied.     
The Law installation represents a creative game, which sets the rules to break them at the same time. A game whose output is an emotional transfer, a translation of the experience of a pipe organ played in an evangelic church into the contemporary musical morphology and industrial space, evoking a sensation that embarks on synesthesia.    

Left hand preaches water while the right one is drinking wine.      

The abundant scale of the organ pipes of the Holy Savior Church in Prague resounds now amongst the walls of Kostka Gallery, while colorful patterns illuminate and flicker upon objects arranged in space.  The original randomly chosen text that is the key to decoding both the tones and paintings remains blurred in the background.    
The authors apply their own system to convey the organ music experience. “We use it this way as no one has ever seen music before. Visualization of sound is an abstract concept that offers so many ways of expression that certain order must be introduced that one might rely upon at least in the beginning”, Pavla Nešverová says.  
The system is based upon the transformation of a text into music and image, with the help of triple coding. The authors decompose familiar structures (language, music, image) into their elementary parts to put together a new visual composition afterwards.   
The musical instrument itself is the first to be analyzed: the pipe organ components (the facade, pipes, blind windows, tile / marble and manuals) are abstracted into simple shapes, whose composition constitutes the basis of the actual installation in the gallery.    
The projection of images being reflected on the objects’ surface also yields to coding. Digital patterns whose animation reminds one of the reading process are assigned to individual letters, syllables and sentences.  
And finally there is the music, a recording of the pipe organ sound transferred from the vaulted space of an evangelical church among the walls of an industrial art gallery.  While the bass line corresponds to the encoded transcription of the text similar to what happens to the image, the melody part of higher keys strives for harmony. In other words the left hand dogmatically follows the canon while the right is improvising, the left hand preaching water while the right is drinking wine. “In fact we create a system to be able to disrupt it later. It is the interplay of coincidence and deliberate action that I find quite fascinating. Often wonderful moments happen when letters fall quite exactly into the number of slots, rhythm, time, without you having calculated it. Certain limitations imposed by an order may become the launching pad that will get you to surprising artistic solutions,” replies Jana Babincová to my question why she creates such a complicated system, “the law”, if she herself later breaks it.    

The collaboration of the two authors Jana Babincová and Pavla Nešverová requires the same abilities as the players need when improvising music. Not only must they perfectly master their instruments but also the overall harmony is essential to prevent a displeasing chaos and disruption of the whole composition. Zákon / The Law installation is, after the Gammatone exhibition at the Pragovka Gallery, the second project in which the two authors pass from original mutual admiration to cooperation where they jointly put their artistic experience to create harmonious composition of forms, colors and tones.  

Eva Riebová                                      

Contact and more information:  
Šárka Maroušková → PR Manager → +420 723 706 249 sarka.marouskova@meetfactory.cz  
Zuzana Kolouchová → PR Specialist → +420 739 055 862 zuzana.kolouchova@meetfactory.cz  

Open daily 1 – 8 pm and according to the evening program. Voluntary admission fee.    

MeetFactory is supported in 2017 by a grant from the City of Prague amounting to 10.000.000 CZK. 
CT_Zakon_ENG.pdf