Barbora Klímová, winner of the Chalupecký Prize in 2005, is a conceptual artist whose themes straddle time and space. Division and combination are amongst the most visible features of her creative work, be this in the form of installations or projects. By reformulating events which someone else (an artist, theoretician, unknown people) realised in the media, such as a performance, research project or photography archive, she incorporates into her artistic output both a transposition of the original meaning and another model by which it can be read. Through her work she wants to create a new type of contact with the existing prism of history. In site-specific interventions in a gallery or public space she pulls a place out of its conventional significance. The glass partition wall using which Klímová divided the Moravia Gallery, the new colours of the public lighting system, a gradually rising row of tiles, and an object allowing you to see around corners: these are the forms of her real conflict with architecture.
She works with these forms using the same principles as in more abstract projects, which shift perception of the environment along the timeline. This is not “history” as the author of cultural knowledge, these are specific people and their activities. Our view of the past is deformed by what is preserved of it. Klímová combines the tangible results (such as photography and entries in archives) and the retrospective perspective of living creators in such a way as to create a precise message regarding the movement which both divides and links the original with the new.
The best known of her time projects are Replaced (2006), in which she repeated selected well known performances of the sixties and eighties, Personal Events (2008), in which she had persons carry out in the present activities captured in old pictures, and Famous Brno Villas II (2007). Here she designed a parallel event to a different project involving exhibitions and books on the architecture of Brno. Klímová priorities villas from the second third of the 20th century, especially from the period of normalisation, which almost didn’t make it into the original curatorial selection. The composition of a picture of our memory was represented by Our Thing (2009), in which she tracked the development of the Brno institutional art scene in the form of a wall list. This was played out in a list of names of exhibitions organised at local galleries and in the contemporary exhibition of period exhibits from the Gallery of the Young.
