One Knot After Another

  • installation
  • HotDockProjectSpace
  • Bratislava
  • Slovakia
  • 2020

One Knot After Another is the first series of figurative works by the Berlin-based duo Julia Gryboś and Barbora Zentková. For the HotDock project space they have created new installations of solitaire objects which are a continuation of the Tiredness Quotes exhibition from the Karlin Studios in Prague.

The long-standing duo’s interest in different types of textiles led them to choose traditional techniques of weaving, its strong social contexts, and the dynamics they represent. Ipso facto alludes to the reflection on the research and develop an interest in the different materials as hand-dyed tapestries used as a specific symbol of permanent efficiency. Each knot of the tapestry stands as a sign of human labor-intense work and represents both: the effort and the power one needs to constantly perform. Focusing as well on emphasis on productivity combined with entanglement in economic structures.

In the context of figurativeness, artists bring the associations of a kind of "human ornaments" that create, as a late capitalist society, symbolic ornaments as a part of the traditional elements of the kilims and tapestries to which refer formally. Although the artists departed from the typical anatomical pattern as that is the male body. By using a figure of the female body known to them haptically, they used it as a subconscious model, entangling the gymnast's body in complicated thread structures. Metaphorically it refers to the entanglement in economic structures, where ornaments together with arts and crafts techniques are situated as a female practice. Craft becomes a springboard, a way to constantly work through everyday life, and at the same time a metaphor for the social status of female artists. Thus, the creators suggest the viewer reach beyond the schematic framework of identifying objects, putting them in a new context.

The origin and primary function of the materials used are significant. Some of it comes from bankrupt small private stores. In this context varieties of the 'invisible hand' of the market and the different influences, it may have to focus on the dynamics of changes in socio-economic structures, where duo intended exploration of the subject of collective fatigue, which is believed to be the result of the dehumanizing conditions of neoliberalism, the non-stop market, and the accompanying postulates of continuous performance. Consequently accumulating threads of materials becomes a metaphor for working through a mundane life.
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text: Magdalena Adameczek
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photo: Leontína Berková