Dana Sahánková: You Will Never Find Serenity in Your Shell

Description

Dana Sahánková continuously works with the medium of large-format drawing. The title of her exhibition and the publication of the same name “You will never find Serenity in your shell” is a modification of a quotation from one of Mepista’s replicas. In the background of the project, one can feel the Faustian theme, which the author touches on in the longer-term visual thematization of time and memory. To express them, he has long used an arsenal of selected animals (wolves, dogs, deer, cats) in relation to the space, which is constantly changing. This allegorized relationship, which is a dynamic “ingrowth” of figures and their frames, is sometimes complemented by mythical characters with some unspecified mission (eg the returning dream figure of a little angel). Predators represented by elected animals are excluded from their dominant roles and become victims of passing time. Their bodies, full of aggressive gestures, disintegrate into fragments and are assembled into new wholes evoking a dreamy atmosphere, states of ecstasy, enlightenment or hallucinations. The “rippling space” itself, whose structure is constantly falling apart and collapsing or changing as a result of an unknown mechanism, is also unreal. The viewer can often feel like an uninvited guest here. We dive into deep psychoanalytic situations in their polarization rawness, or into constellations, which in metaphorical abbreviation transcend the human scale not only in the level of physical, but especially in the level of reflexive consciousness. By escalating uncertainty, the author reveals the reverse side of the systematized and rationalized world in which we live.

Texts: Petr Vaňous, Iva Mladičová, Dana Sahánková
Graphic design: Jana Vahalíková
Production: Blanka Čermáková
Photos: Lukáš Kliment, Tomáš Rasl, Jaroslav Brabec
Translation: Phil Jones
Year: 2018
Pages:  130