(En) Ján Mančuška’s films, installations and stage performances are based on the reception and conception of space. The artist uses linguistic and figurative means to implement a reconfiguration of space, often connected to a fragmentary, dramaturgical, sometimes surreal or existentialistic narrative. A predominant theme in his choreographic concepts is movement; in visual, semantic, architectural and corporeal forms of expression it is articulated – and then dissolved. For his present show in Meyer …
(En) Ján Mančuška’s films, installations and stage performances are based on the reception and conception of space. The artist uses linguistic and figurative means to implement a reconfiguration of space, often connected to a fragmentary, dramaturgical, sometimes surreal or existentialistic narrative. A predominant theme in his choreographic concepts is movement; in visual, semantic, architectural and corporeal forms of expression it is articulated – and then dissolved. For his present show in Meyer Riegger gallery the artist created three new pieces, which shift between graphic art, text piece, sculpture, installation and film. Reconstruction, association and disassociation are perceptive techniques that connect and correlate the individual pieces.
In his installation Notion in Progress, Ján Mančuška outlines a description of space. The focal points of the work are the three words Cine, Mato and Graphy which the artist positioned in the room in various media and materials – a free-standing wooden sculpture, a wall projection and a floor graphic. Similar to a mind map, individual associative words branch out from this primary word structure, developing like a chain of terms – in this case physically along wires that span the room diagonally. The installation oscillates between the visibility and the immateriality of thoughts, which condense into fictive, cinematic sequences within the process of contemplating and reading.
The 16 mm film Postcatastrophic Story is presented on three projectors and causes the disassociation of a chronological order to become a constitutive part of the film image as well as the film narrative: The plot revolves around a news report shown from the viewpoint and basically from the memory of five protagonists. The subject is an insignificant catastrophe that occurred in an unspecified town, which one of the protagonists noticed in a newspaper. In the course of the film, which shows each scene looped in delay, the characters as well as the plot threads belonging to the individuals engage in a dialogue with one another.
Christina Irrang
translated by Zoe Miller
