Jana Kasalová was born in 1974 in Turnov into a family of artists. Her father was Svatopluk Kasalý and her mother Jana Kasalová. She spent her childhood in Železný Brod in Northern Bohemia. She departed from the family glassmaking tradition by studying textiles and fashion design at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Brno, after which she studied painting with Jiří Načeradský at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. In her final year she was awarded a prize for her work. During her studies in Brno in the 1990s she also completed two internships, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1996) and a year later at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton, Great Britain). In 1999, she undertook a residency in New York. She completed her doctoral studies in Cuenca and Madrid in Spain at the Universidad Castilla-La Mancha and the Universidad Complutense. This was made possible thanks to a Spanish state scholarship and a grant from the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation VIZE 97. During the interval between her official postgraduate studies, she received the Barcelona Royal Talens Painting Award. Between 2002 and 2004, she lived and worked in London, New York and Paris, whence she moved permanently to Prague in 2005. She was awarded a PhD in fine arts and art therapy from the Universidad Castilla-La Mancha in 2010.
Jana Kasalová’s work can be divided into three broad categories according to the media used: paper, canvas, or work involving new media. These formally defined areas partly reflect upon their own thematic delineation: the first two forms are used by the artist primarily to process content related to memory within the horizon of time and space (maps or landscapes in cartographic form) and human corporeality (works created using mother’s milk). Photographs and videos are in the main concerned with the duality of man and animal, culture and nature.
Regardless of the categories and forms referred to above, a common denominator can be found in her work, namely, proceduralism, i.e. an attempt to instantiate, embed and find expression for diverse temporal and experiential levels in different stages of human life. This contemplation can therefore be viewed in two ways: as an attempt to come to terms with general historical memory; but also as the artist’s intimate confession or therapy of self-discovery.
Her selection of media was initially influenced by various external circumstances, such as the substitution of large canvases with drawings on panels. It is, after all, drawing that has always occupied pride of place in Kasalová’s oeuvre instead of being a private discipline, and this allows her to create individual layers of meaning as well as to test the limits of the medium. Drawing appears in her work as a smudge of pastel, cast paint, digital print, mother’s milk or dust.
The thematic level of Kasalová’s work is almost always related to nature and the idea of home. This is palpable in the conceptually conceived landscapes and cities in the form of cartographic cycles with which she began working at the turn of the millennium in Great Britain, when she first experienced a distance from home. Since that time she has frequently manipulated and interrogated the map as an object of a kind of imaginary security, thus effectively highlighting its most problematic aspects, namely selectivity and mutability. The exploration of this relationship between humankind and the environment, the topography of place and the archaeology of human memory, was already the focus of the first series entitled Mapy pozemské (Tabulae Terrae). Using translucent paper, the maps in question appeared as multi-layered diary entries open to the interpretative possibilities of code (cartography proper), while the naming of places, rather than representing reality and truth, was manifest as a reference to literally legible recollections. This is especially evident in the older maps, which are not merely past images of Central European history, long-gone empires (Osterreich-Ungarn or Regnorum Hungariae), with crossed-out or retouched names of villages whose German inhabitants were expelled after the Second World War. On paper, then, the human dominated landscape appears burdened with political history, a landscape that does not exist in and of itself. All of this culminates in nameless landscapes without people or in their abstracted forms – from blackened, whitewashed or blind maps emerge places that survive only as shadows. Even more interesting is the fact that the names of these settlements are often inspired by animals: Liščí Hora (Fuchsberg or Fox Mountain), Vlčí Jáma (Wolfsgrub or Wofl Pit), as well as the title of the entire second series.
Kasalová continues to reflect upon migration and identity in the series Města / Cities and Ztracená města / Lost Cities, and this results in three types of work. The first type involves bi-coloured letterpress digital prints in which metropolises take on geometric shapes, borders and a certain rhythm based on the naming of streets (the first city created in this way was Munich, followed by Prague, Vienna, Paris, Cairo, and Beijing). The second type of work involves cut-outs of urban locations in which different languages are combined referring to the cultural and linguistic past or future of the place in question. And the third type involves deformed maps covered with tiny rocaille beads, again referencing the borderlands: the tradition of their production, which by no means coincidentally Kasalová’s grandfather was involved in, belonged to Liberec. Kasalová’s attention to contour and scale is on show in this unusual combination of maps and beads, which in a casket creates a new kind of drawing reminiscent of a wrinkled mountain range.
The exhibition Odjinud / From Elsewhere at the Regional Gallery in Liberec, curated by Markéta Kroupová, put on display not only the works mentioned above, but introduced another dimension to Kasalová’s work, namely, working with a specific place. The artist expanded the topic of emigration and immigration and (non)identity to the context of territory and collective neurosis. The return to the homeland was accentuated by the trunks of trees with root bales torn from the places they had been planted by the original German population, which were displayed in a former swimming pool hall in which Germans, Czechs and Jews used to bathe in the past.
Another example of this type of work is the video-mapping on the facade of the Maior Synagogue as part of the Boskovice 2020 – Festival for the Jewish Quarter. Kasalová drew on the established format of the Jerusalem street network, which she supplemented with authentic field audio recordings. In her hands, site-specific work is often combined with performance, which in turn gestures towards physicality. Such was the case with her participation at the Artperforming Festival 2017 at Palazzo Monte Manso di Scala and Casteldell’Ovo in Naples, where drawings and maps were created in a layer of volcanic dust scattered on cigarette paper.
For Kasalová, dealing with the carnality, animalism and instinct of humankind is a theme undoubtedly connected to home and nature and concerns the relationship between the human being, their body and their environment. The transformation of the safe, familiar landscape that is her own body, which she underwent during something as natural as pregnancy, led the artist to the outline drawings (or perhaps “body maps”) entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica and also to a series of diary entries State written in mother’s milk. In her latest cycle, Milky Way, mother’s milk is enriched with phosphorus, which stabilises th bodily substance so that it leaves a permanent recording on black paper.
Kasalová explored the concept of the animal kingdom, the notion of the animal and the transformation into it in her doctoral thesis Zoomorfní prvky v umění / Zoomorphic Elements in Art and further developed it in her three-part video series Zvíře, kterým jsem, zvíře ve mně / The Animal I am, the Animal in Me. The moving images, in which she becomes an animal under the influence of her reading of Derrida, Guattari and Deleuze, are complemented by a series of still photographs entitled Jako Ty / Like You, taken in the wild or in the castle’s hunting gallery. This deliberately constructed contrast juxtaposes the highly aestheticised Renaissance environment and the wild with ordinary animal activities such as chewing grass or drinking from a nearby river.
Jana Kasalová’s body of work is consistent, her style is instantly recognisable, and the way she handles a range of media, including drawing across a fixed set of themes, is unique. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and is represented in many private collections, particularly in Spain and Italy. Finally, her cartographic work speaks to the current situation in which migration in Europe caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is bringing about a further transformation of human experience in space.
