Dušan Zahoranský

Dušan Zahoranský was educated and started out as an artist in Slovakia, but he has long been a figure in the Czech art scene. His work is a fusion of a conceptual outlook and thoroughly material and sculptural approach to his visual treatment of objects and installations. In his earliest works he was already combining spatial installations with video in interesting ways, which can be seen, for example, in his piece 300 000 000 Years (1999). The juxtaposition of his predominantly sculptural approach to objects and the materialised presence of a text in them has long been a prominent theme in his work. The tension generated by this fusion of an artistically conceived material artefact and the adaptation of its appearance into a semantic message in the form of a text plays on the classic duality of perception involving the object and its commentary. Here the conceptual distance is lost and, as in the case of the work Here and Now (Tady a teď, 2008), or more recently The (linguistic) Circle (2012), and the text is in the foreground of how its material substance is played with. It is as though the material character of the artefacts actually wins out over the text and its message; this is readily apparent in his work Manifesto (2012), in which only a negative imprint of that word remained present in material form, and a written manifesto by the artist was burned after being recited aloud just once. All that survived was that material, visually worked residuum in the contours of the word that forms the work’s title. A separate chapter in Zahoranský’s art is his video works, which sometimes employ visual reinterpretations of musical and literary contexts (e.g. Georgian Summer (2006).