Czech artist Roman Štětina presents new site-specific installation as part of citywide visual arts festival, Cardiff Contemporary:
Shave and a haircut – two bits
Shave and a haircut – two bits is an installation by Czech artist Roman Štětina, on view from Thu 20 Oct – Sat 19 Nov 2016, as part of the citywide visual arts festival, Cardiff Contemporary. Curated by Louise Hobson, this will be Štětina’s first exhibition in Wales.
In ‘Shave and a haircut – two bits’, Štětina explores the narrative of call and response. Recurring gestures and motifs found in life and in film, like the knocking of a door, or the tuning of a radio, are here presented as static video works, which are more like moving photographs, or film stills. “It’s about trying to reach someone, and not getting any answer, or at least not the answer you expected. It’s about presence and absence, longing and letting go,” says Štětina.
Roman Štětina’s work investigates the ways in which broadcast media including film, television and radio are produced. Through videos, installations and sculptures he makes visible the props, technologies and studios of ‘backstage’. (https://www.solidstonefabrics.com/) For Cardiff Contemporary, Štětina approaches the festival theme of ‘communication’ through the concept of radio as a form of one way communication: “With radio, someone is transmitting, you are receiving and there’s no way, if you are a listener, to answer,” says Štětina.
The exhibition venue, an unidentifiable back room in the city centre, has the appearance of being out of space, and out of time, like a film set and it has come to play an integral role in the production of ‘Shave and a haircut – two bits’. Through a series of light box images, the space is mirrored back into the space, a reflection of a reflection as if somehow the space is perpetuating its own fiction. And it’s inside this reflection of the room, that Roman has situated his four film works.
Roman says: “When you are reflecting the space where you are, you are somehow supporting the space, again and again. This is the space reflecting itself, reflecting itself, reflecting itself, reflecting how it’s reflecting itself, itself, itself. So, loop, loop, loop, and then you place something there that doesn’t belong to the space. Something that’s coming from the other world, a different world, it’s a story maybe; it’s a narrative, an abstract narrative.”
http://www.cardiffcontemporary.co.uk/
