Artist: Eva Koťátková
Exhibition title: Interviews with the Monster
Curated by: Rafa Barber Cortell
Venue: La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain
Date: July 7 – October 2, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, La Casa Encendida, Madrid and the respective copyright holders
The third scene of Fantastic Interior, curated by Rafa Barber Cortell, continues to explore the different sensibilities that traverse the semantics of the intimate.
The exhibition, Interviews with the Monster, shows the work by Czech artist Eva Koťátková (Prague, 1982) taking a look at a more mature present in which coexistence occupies a central place. Empathy and relationships between people are the driving force behind this project, which understands imagination as a tool that not only serves our dreams but also helps us change things by outlining new ways of understanding the other in order to create a limitless us.
Interviews with the Monster is the result of a research project lasting more than two years in which the artist investigated the sheltered housing projects for people with special educational needs that were promoted unsuccessfully in various places in the Czech Republic. In the exhibition space we find what appears to be the construction site of one of these buildings that never went ahead, where we are greeted by a series of characters with giant cloth heads created by the artist. These characters represent real and invented (but possible) participants who, in one way or another, were involved in the construction processes of this space during the artist’s research process.
Normality, discrimination and fear of otherness become present in this exhibition. This blown-up fear is referred to by the artist as “the monster”. The monster is the unconscious panic that seizes us when we look at what is different.
In collaboration with the Czech Embassy on the occasion of the beginning of the Presidency of the Czech Republic in the Council of the EU.
