‘La salle de bain’ by Anna Solal at Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA
I’m attractive and intelligent, and it pleases me that I’m being watched. And if I happen to tell a lie or two from time to time, it’s only so you don’t paint a bad picture of me.
Orhan Pamuk: My name is Red
The bathroom is the first part of a project in the frame of which Anna Solal decided to build a house, or rather its equipment, for someone she doesn’t know. For that, she is using junk of the contemporary culture, objects from one euro shops, industrial parts, different pieces of cheap plastic, broken smartphone screens. Those are, however, very laboriously and in a somehow primitive way joint, assembled in new compositions, not unlike 3D mosaics. Their identity is to a certain extent lost, but with a bit of focus it is still recognisable.
Certain concentration, but also distraction, is projected in the way we perceive the work of Anna; how we are getting lost in the details, our sight jumping from one part to another. We may perceive the character of the work and the used materials as a sort of abstraction of contemporary civilisation, its constant short term distraction, lack of concentration, mass quantity but inability to include the whole. There is also something rough and brutal about Anna’s works, in the impudency, rudimentarity of the treatment, that follows the cheapness of the original objects, but almost with a somehow neurotic drive. Thousand-times-twisted threads, pieces of roller bearings and belt studs, are somehow an allegoric depiction of our accelerated presence, the inability to cease, the getting almost to a neurotic psychosis of a drug addict losing themselves to total exhaustion in different details.
The bathroom of Anna Solal is definitely an impoverished one. A small room, musty with dampness and sweet smell of cheap perfume, stains of mold and bad colours of bad make-up. The beauty of the poor, too sweet, too fake. There is something intimate in it, but also repulsive. Something used. It is as if we are facing leftovers of what allowed us to put ourselves together.
In the drawings of towels, clothes scattered on the floor, old toothbrushes and flung shoes we again arrive at a somehow neurotic, even hallucinatory point. The pedicure set transforms itself into a traffic jam and the back view on a girl combing her hair in the repetition changes into some unclear nebula, color stain or a puddle of a body liquid. The assembling and composing is therefore also possible to read as somehow an attempt to hold together a harmony or a system in a situation, where the drive has liberated itself from original impulse and became an out-of-control spiral.
Michal Novotný
Imprint
| Artist | Anna Solal |
| Exhibition | La salle de bain |
| Place / venue | Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague |
| Dates | 16 July 2019 - 15 September 2019 |
| Curated by | Michal Novotný |
| Website | www.futuraproject.cz |
| Index | Anna Solal Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA Michal Novotný |