Štěpánka Šimlová

The work of Štěpánka Šimlová oscillates between the utilisation of new media and occasional returns to the handmade artefact and authorial gesture. As far back as the nineties the artist was availing herself of the possibility of manipulating digital images. This manipulation resulted in a certain obscuring or questioning of the classical perpsectivised space. The space of the artist’s Landscapes (1999) is comprised of individual cells or sites. We encounter a tension between the concept of space (magnitude, res extensa) and place. In modern classical discourse space was taken to be an endless geometric or perspectival continuum (by Descartes and Newton). Spatial qualities were the same in all points of the geometrical network; space could be conceptually modelled. This concept only changes at the start of the modern period in subjective and romantic philosophy. Kant comes up with the concept of place, claiming that we are always somehow oriented in space, space is hierarchical and qualitatively diversified. We live in the space of ourselves but always in our personal subjective and concrete place. Place has meaning only if it is occupied by a subject who determines the spatial and perspectival axes (something is above, something below, to the left, to the right, etc.). However, Kant did not give consideration to the physical subject, but understood it as a certain geometrical or psychical point. Place oriented on the physical subject only appears in phenomenological or existential philosophy. Here, space is not a kind of ideal continuum, but the sequence of concrete places which can be occupied. In the modern period the concept appears of subjective or relative space (even physical theories believe that space is not defined by straight lines but oriented vectors, which have their concrete trajectories – Minkowski or Mach). Šimlová identifies with this concept of space. The utilisation of individualised places can be understood as an alternative to the anonymity and artificiality of the consumer space. The artist attacks market icons and communication in her other works too, in which she replaces one-dimensional commercial messages with emotive or existential statements. This serves to disturb banal and commonplace expectations (e.g. Tokyo, 2000 or I am terribly sorry, 2002). In her digital montages and photographic cycles her utilisation of the element of time is conspicuous. The images are not static, but often comprise a certain ambiguous narrative which is dynamised through the use of various perspectival axes, the alternation of detail and whole, etc. The artist conceived of many of her installations with a particular place in mind in which she sought an unmistakable quality of memory.