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The fall of the Berlin Wall crucially restructured not only global
politics and economics but also the living conditions of millions of
people in Eastern Europe. It brought about freedom of speech, a
free-market economy, and freedom of movement that most Eastern Europeans
had not dreamed of for several decades. It also led, however, to harsh
social stratification that eventually resulted in economic decline and
poverty for many citizens both urban and rural.
The two artists whose work is presented in this gallery are both
participants in a group exhibition called Behind the Velvet Curtain:
Seven Czech Women Artists, which is being shown at the Katzen Center
at the American University in Washington, D.C., from April 2 through May
18, 2009. The exhibition shows works by seven significant Czech women
artists who, with a variety of media (video, installation, photography,
drawing), challenge mechanisms of power related to gender, sexual,
ethnic, and national identity. The title of the show, Behind the
Velvet Curtain, evokes the notorious concept of the Iron Curtain
that signified the impermeable border around the former Soviet Bloc,
and, at the same time, refers to the well-known cognomen of the
political changes in former Czechoslovakia in 1989, the Velvet
Revolution. However, both words—"velvet" and "curtain"—are commonly
employed in a much less symbolic way; they literally mean fabric or
cloth that is soft, often used for women's clothing or in the home. The
two words thus carry strong connotations of women's space—the sphere of
privacy, domesticity, sexuality, fantasy, but also of care-taking and
luxury. And it is mainly in this context where intimacy and politics
create an inseparable pair through which the exhibition is framed.
Martina Pachmanová
April 2009
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