Artist: Anna Hulačová
Exhibition title: Sow ideals and harvest hybrids
Venue: fluent, Santander, Spain
Date: March 19 – June 18, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and fluent, Santander
fluent presents Sow ideals and harvest hybrids, Anna Hulačová’s first solo exhibition in Spain.
In her sculptural work Hulačová reflects the transformation of organic and cultural landscapes in a process of rapid industrial extinction. Her work, deeply rooted in folklore, indigenieties and the tensions between artisanal and industrial forms of living, expresses a desire to resist the annihilation that neo–liberal forces impose onto rural territories and societies.
Her solo exhibition at fluent, which marks the first presentation of her work in Spain, revisits a group of concrete figures: insects, humans, plants and public statues mutating into one another.
During the collectivization process of land, the management of farms in the Czech Republic was mostly organized on a hierarchical division of the territories. The local legacies of labor, care and coexistence were soon replaced by precariousness, extraction and pollution similarly to today’s use of land by big corporations. For Hulačová, these histories are about the subjugation of nature both in collectivized and liberalized systems.
In Sow ideals and harvest hybrids, Hulačová populates the space with concrete sculptures echoing the idea of a Soviet public monument. However these figures take on the familiar appearance of a public monument they soon turn into ambiguous, hybrid beings. Inert humans take on a vegetal appearance while disembodied insects turn into an abstraction of their flesh. In them, themes of memory, mortality, transformation and metamorphosis are embodied through the use of symbolic materials, folklores and narratives.
Anna Hulačová (1984, Sušice) lives and works in Prague. Recently, she has exhibited her work at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris: Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, NL; The Baltic Triennal, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius and the Prague City Gallery.
