Mine Mine Not Yours!

The dual and the unique, the usual and the infrequent, embodied in roles and mimicry that freely yet indivisibly spill over one into the other and lead us from surprise to amazement, from the ephemeral to the common, are by all accounts the central theme of this exhibition. I can perhaps, right at the beginning, reveal that the artist <waanja> is also the curator Radek Váňa, who has been living in Amsterdam since 2002, and has from time to time presented himself also as an artist, mostly working with photographs in an informedly post-conceptual form. In this double role, the curator-artist naturally oscillates between distance and immersion, between noticing and taking interest. <waanja> is thus an amused father in the streets of Amsterdam, who in the country where he has long been at home and yet remains an amazed foreigner, observes, together with his small son, the frivolous creativity of his fellow Netherlanders. Together, <waanja> and Váňa thus form a two-in-one creative duo, who, out of the very tension of that duality (recall the kindred duo Jasanský and Polák), create projects that not only describe the social and aesthetic anomaly of the public space, but themselves also pose questions about the nature of art in general and about its transferability and comprehensibility in everyday practice.
In the set Pure&Honest (2002), <waanja> charts out the temporary low-tech architecture of the make-shift entrances, stairs, gates, and bay windows, the stubborn patches of the venerable Dutch buildings. The series Taken (begun in 2008) then depicts the ‘staking out’ of parking places in an Amsterdam crammed full of cars. In both cases, the low-budget creativity, aimed at the temporary functionality or the simple delimitation of space in the street, reveals itself, to the inquisitive art historian, to be even surprisingly consistent with contemporary ‘expanded sculpture’, only constructed for other reasons and from other starting points. In any event, the space of the street becomes, in both series, an exhibition, with a makeshift podium for primitive sculptors. The walks of the whimsical art historian become the works of the artist-flâneur. They thus blur the boundaries between the public and the personal, between function and game, craftsmanship and DIY, design and cheekiness. The street becomes, as the avant-garde artists once wished, an endless gallery. The only question is who’s going to clean it up.
As if this duality were not enough, one must also mention that the artist, who goes by the name <waanja>, first introduced himself to the public at a joint exhibition with the painter Jan Merta in the Galerie Velryba, in Prague, exactly twenty years ago. This time, <waanja> has invited as a guest artist another of his old friends, Jiří Kovanda, whose installations and interventions on the boundary of communicability and perceivability clearly correspond to our themes. What kind of amalgam of obsessed multiplicity will emerge during the installation can itself only be thrillingly guessed at beforehand, so that ultimately we too leave divided but amused.
Pavel Vančát