Cancelled Stop

Cancelled Stop
   
The cancellation of a bus stop or a tram stop is a banality, something we regularly encounter without paying much thought to. At least until the moment it clashes with our daily routine. Then it earns our protests and censure. But we may also come across a relocated tram stop or bus stop out of the blue, unexpectedly, in a place we know like the back of our hands, somewhere we have been returning to for years. Then our reaction is one of surprise, opening the gate for a stream of memories. What we once considered ordinary is suddenly absent, leading to feelings of nostalgia and melancholy.

The works of Adéla Leinweberová balance on the boundary of banality (of something usual and overlooked) and the catalyst of emotion. Through her camera we become observers, voyeurs of everyday little etudes in which nothing is unusual and yet is full of intense pathos, regardless of whether the scene is from Prague, Barcelona, or Venice.

In her video-poems, most of which are nearly static, Adéla observes the individual and his or her involuntary solitude and efforts to overcome it. Adéla invents nothing; she only chooses from the images around her. In her videos she merely confirms the existence of the world, which she aesthetically supplements with photographs of window curtains and symbolically adds to with the artefact of an abandoned hornet’s nest.

With its installation, the exhibition aims to invert the customs associated with the Josef Sudek Studio, and thereby to stimulate the viewer to perceive the banal in a new light. In her art, Adéla Leinweberová has long used humour and a touch of irony to reveal powerful emotions linked with intimacy, and as a side-effect she has created here a monologue of works that are studies in solitude from many of angles, including unwanted, undeserved, and even necessary solitude.

Tereza Jindrová
Exhibition curator