V rukou / In Hand

After graduating from university, during her maternity leave Klodová focused on cutting, gluing and creating collages from pornographic magazines. This became an important springboard for her work in the following years, characterised by her interest in the female body, sexuality, but also sexualisation and objectification. In early collages such as Spáčky / Sleeping Women (1999), the artist approaches the body as an open structure and explores its nature, character and significance under changing circumstances. Her approach avoids moralising, but emphases the act of caring, as when she gently dresses cut-out models in duvets or clothes (Lidovky / People, 2001 and Panenky / Dolls, 2001). All of these activities take place in the artist’s home, and the cut-out characters are perceived as dolls rather than sex bombs. In this way, the sexualised bodies of the models, who were originally to be the object of pleasure and excitement, become caricatures, their expressive faces or positions become incomprehensible, unable to fulfil their original function, and thus they reveal their genuine character to be performative in nature. Klodlová deploys this strategy to highlight the alienation of women both from the descriptive way of representing the female body and sexuality and the models from themselves. She attempts to return identity to anonymous models, to incarnate them, to “return” their genuine physicality to them. This tension between the two-dimensionality of pornographic dolls and the real body is explicitly reflected in Klodová’s photographic project V rukou / In Hand (2001). In this work the artist gently takes the female figures in the picture into her hands, offers them maternal protection, and at the same time makes visible and subverts the tension between the human body and the image as used in a pornographic magazine.

“I was interested in the contact of the real, physical body with the image of a body cut out of a magazine. A picture of a naked model in my real hands. It is a confrontation that a porn magazine experiences constantly – a living body versus a paper body.” (LK)