Darina Alster expresses herself most often through performance, the spoken word, multimedia installations and video. The main themes of her work are time, identity, religion and personal or political relationships. She crosses the boundaries of reality, disrupting ordinary situations with incomprehensible irrational phenomena, and allowing the subconscious to speak. She likes to combine new media with archaic media such as astrology, tarot, religion, fairy tales and other kinds of archetypes.
She deals with issues such as pregnancy, birth and motherhood, though she attempts to portray this strong but somewhat profane theme in an atypical way, on the level of personal mythology, which she develops on the basis of her own feelings about motherhood in combination and comparison with ancient myths, fertility cults and witchcraft (Venus, Isis, Cybele, Demeter, Lilith, Kali, Sophia, Madonna). The theme of “breastfeeding” art naturally relates to a certain period in her life when she was herself experiencing pregnancy.
Her works are sometimes mutually contrasting. They express security or insecurity, or the interface between good and evil, light and darkness. Alster is interested in religious mysticism, its different types and degrees and the differences between believers. She works with allegories, and she does not want to express herself too openly and directly, but instead lets the imagination of the audience unfold. Different kinds of mysticism have their own codes, which cannot always be revealed and which may remain hidden. She deals with faith, which can sometimes seem to have been discredited as a mere cover for gaining power and wealth, but can also represent the only certainty allowing us to banish doubts and move towards a chosen goal.
Alster is also interested in symbols that have passed through history with diverse meanings, both positive and negative (e.g. the swastika, which she has tried to cleanse from the taint of Nazism). In her performances she draws on symbols that have ambiguous meanings that often depend on individual personal experience and the part of society to which one belongs. She also establishes close contact with the audience and often involves them directly. During one of her performances on the popular theme of female identity, she draped a cloth over herself with pinned slips of diverse, often contrasting, female characteristics, and let the participants take them as they wished.
Some of her work evolves slowly, with Alster trying out different variants before deciding on the final form. One of her typical motifs is that of an altar that does not correspond to any particular religion or official teaching. She has explored different types of altar, looking at Catholic, Hindu or Buddhist versions and their iconography, structure or construction. She sometimes, quite consciously, works with a degraded aesthetics and an almost romantic kitsch. With “altars” featuring various objects, she also tries to recall the still lifes that people have at home, consisting of strange fetishes. She uses different technical methods and selects a variety of materials so that they can be seen from different angles due to their different forms.
Another important feature of her work is the exploration of the relationship between men and women and the female and male approach to various issues. She examines the possibility of a man transitioning into a woman and vice versa. She chooses different and often unexpected means of expression to express her view on the issues that interest her. For example, she made a video with Michelle Šiml, using the latter’s photographs in which she sometimes appears as a boy and sometimes as a girl. The artists printed the photographs on edible paper, Michelle then ate herself, and eventually the photos were eaten by the visitors to the performance. Alster explores human feelings in different situations, along with the acquisition and loss of identity. With Jana Orlová, for example, she drew inspiration from the “live” altar at her exhibition at the NoD Gallery, this time round expressing certain rituals associated with the life of a woman and the relationship between the two sexes.
Alster also reflects on the formation or, on the contrary, the disintegration of certain positive systems, which are being disrupted by increasingly extremist views in society. She responds to the social crisis that forms the accompaniment to contemporary developments. She examines the connections between different epochs, such as contemporary “progress” and ancient mythologies. She reacts sensitively to the changing political situation, in which destruction is becoming more and more prevalent. Through her performances she draws attention to negative phenomena, tries to contribute to a mutual understanding of different groups of people regardless of their status and situation, and responds to specific manifestations of intolerance. She creates performances in various locations in the Czech Republic and abroad, in which symbols from different periods are intertwined with contemporary events. She also deals with the theme of emergence and extinction.
As part of the collective performance Teatrum Mundi, a farewell to the gallery at Karlin Studios (2016), she and Jana Orlová invited performers, dancers and volunteers to participate, with many of the projects taking place simultaneously for several hours. This was to show, among other things, how all the activities interacted and how diverse energies added, subtracted or multiplied. For Alster it is not only her own feelings that are important, but the experience of the viewers, who should allow her work to affect them freely, regardless of whether they admire it or whether it arouses incomprehension or even disgust.
Alster is interested in unity in diversity bringing harmony and tension, in which questions are posed though no clear answers are given. We can only suspect the direction of her ideas, which stimulate the imagination of the audience and make them think about a broader range of problems. Her basic themes don’t really change much, but over time they move to a different plane, deepen, and acquire a sharper focus.
