Hidden plants 2023/2024
interior installation, digital printing
The project, which is created in cooperation with Jiří Kovanda and Ivana Lovětínská, is thematically focused on the clients of the Cultural Club of the Volunteer Centre Ústí nad Labem. This space is being used and also gradually built by a community of Ukrainian migrants, mainly women and children, who have fled to the Czech Republic to escape the Russian war aggression. It offers educational programs, special interest groups, counseling services, and most importantly, it serves as a place to meet and support in difficult situations, which its visitors, who are often exposed to life’s difficult trials, must painfully cope with. Jiří Kovanda and Ivana Lovětínská, through their artistic intervention, try to develop the overall quality of the interior of this club by furnishing it with objects that reinforce its specific functions linked to specific activities. Sliding doors, large seating cushions, fabric curtains or wall screens offer the possibility of dividing or modifying individual rooms for the purposes of work meetings, children’s games or social gatherings. The floral motifs found by the artist in specialist natural history publications and used in the form of prints or textile patterns, refer to the care of a shared place, but also to natural acts of gifting or rooting in a new and unfamiliar environment. The common colour expression of the individual interventions, whose character oscillates between elements of design and conceptual artistic gesture, then, by leaning towards yellow and blue – i.e. the Ukrainian national colours – represents the identity of a community seeking, even with the support of the Cultural Club’s activities, a new perspective in their contemporary asylum. Monumentalized and abstracted by raster reproduction technology, the geometrically rhythmic images of plants seem to complement the interior of the Cultural Club with the atmosphere of their original and now violently abandoned home, as they evoke memories of the lost tranquility of vast fields of gilding grain and the clear blue of the sky on a hot summer day.