Platónovo třetí oko

Karina Kottová’s exhibition Plato’s Third Eye (2014) originated while she was a curator at the MeetFactory, where she was in charge of the dramaturgy of the local gallery between the years 2012 and 2015. Prior to starting at the MeetFactory, Kottová initiated and collaborated on several independent curator and educational projects in the area of contemporary art. She also worked in established institutions such as Museum Kampa and DOX Centre for Contemporary Art.

During the three years of managing the gallery in the MeetFactory, Kottová participated on a more active inter-genre cross connection of individual program lines, and primarily on a tighter cooperation between the residential and exhibition programs. She built her curator projects primarily on group exhibitions with a focus on the reflections of existing approaches to contemporary art, as well as on the contextualisation of local art creation and confrontation of the Czech scene with international artists. Prevailing in her program were primarily thematic exhibitions that were often based on literary and philosophical references and their mutual overlapping. They touched emotional or irrational approaches to getting to know the world and to art perception, while individual art projects were composed into constellations based on free and intuitive associations with an emphasis on a critical reflection of contemporary social phenomena.

The foundation of the exhibition Plato’s Third Eye is the concept of Plato’s cave and the notion that reality perceived through senses consists of only the shadows of real ideas. Karina Kottová’s conception of this reflection is complemented by two other interpretations. The first is of scientific character and is based on the research of cognitive and neurological systems, declaring that the perception of the surrounding world is possible only through our sensations, which are subsequently processed and interpreted by our brain. These anatomic and physiological limits of our bodies cannot be crossed. The second interpretation is in the form of an esoteric approach, which acknowledges that there is a way to exit the cave of our skull – through the so-called third eye, which opens the door for us to supernatural perception. In her curator’s concept, Karina Kottová plays with these ideas and she does not only focus on the process of the construction of the surrounding world in certain boundaries and frameworks, but also on what the exit from the cave means for individual artists. The exhibition worked with the topic of perception and viewpoint, as well as with the question of manipulation thereof, creating illusions and phantoms primarily on the principle of light and shadow, tension between tangible and intangible, or on the basis of deconstruction and fragmentation. Additionally, Plato’s Third Eye touched on the topic of the construction and reconstruction of reality or personal and collective history and memory, which the artists approached through archeological and archive processes that were artistically interpreted with final touch ups. In this context, the exhibition comes close to the principles of alter modernism, which also chime in Karina Kottová’s older projects at the MeetFactory (The Opposite Is the Truth, 2012 or The Journey, 2014), or in the project Circular Ruins (2014, also MeetFactory) by the hosting curator Jean-Marc Avrill, (Note: Altermodern is the notion of Nicolas Bourriaud, that was intended to depict the character of a specific type of art form that was part of the new modernistic turn at the beginning of the 21^st century. It is based on fragmentation arising from the plurality of approaches and expressions, and it is characteristic in its interest in archives, archeology and subsequent reconstruction, and potentially in the observation of working with networks that unwind across time and space.)

Karina Kottová created an intuitive installation and network of mutual dialogues and confrontations that address the question of current spirituality, society’s current attitude towards it, and how the desire to cross the limits of one’s own deliberation is becoming a commodity in today’s neo-capitalist society.