Katarína Slezáková, The Július Koller Society, March 2023
The JKS team started a series of events that will tackle the topics that are present within the exhibition program from an inclusive and sustainable perspective to engage various target groups, such as art students and the community in Nova Cvernovka.
The series, under the name U.F.O. (stands for Udržateľná Feministická Operácia – Sustainable Feminist Operation), will be held in Slovak (or Czech) to lower the barrier of active participation. The topics are going to derive from the main program at JKS but with a new perspective outside the scope of art and art theory/history. The goal is to open discussion within the JKS community about inclusive and sustainable topics by engaging experts based on lived experience, activism or from humanities, social sciences and environmental studies.
We are developing the format of the U.F.O. series and preparing for the first event, which is going to take place in early April. The event is going to be built on the exhibition of Zbyněk Baladrán. After we visited the Brno iteration of the exhibition in February, we knew we wanted to focus on the topic of work explored in some of the pieces. There were other lines we were also interested in (especially the decolonial perspective), but we realized these could be explored further along the year as it matches with the next collective exhibit under the curation of Canan Batur which will open in late May. The topic of work sparked our interest on two levels: one was from the exhibition piece that utilized ancient paintings of working slaves to deliver factual information on the situation of the precariat or so called working poor in today’s Czech society. These people are often caught in debts, mounted by interest and debt collector fees, that they can never pay off, yet they still work, but have minimal income – thus their life is quite reminiscent of the lives of the slaves in the past. Another idea related more directly to the IoK project because it draws from the relation of work and care, which neatly ties in with the topics of kinship and togetherness, as well as inclusion. The binary relationship of work and care – with work being associated with labor and being the economically rewarded and socially recognised source of status, while care is understood in terms of love, emotions and driven from the inside of the individual that gets pleasure out of service itself and is not necessarily associated with financial reward or social status – is evocative of the gender binary itself and strongly woven into the fabric of heteronormative patriarchy. Based on our experience in JKS, this often translates into how the art world operates, which types of activities are recognised and praised, and which are disregarded, made invisible or taken or granted. Therefore we decided to follow this path in the first event (Care is Not Free: The Forms of (Un)Paid Work).
