The Melancholy Mad Tenant (a solo show)

2022
Solo exhibition
Jiri Svestka Gallery, Prague

Like the rings of Saturn, the exhibition The Melancholy Mad Tenant oscillates around a cosmic body that is one of the most distant in our planetary system, with many astronomical and cultural mysteries and contradictions associated with it. Central here is the moody Saturn and its strange "mental" gravity, with which a number of troubled thinkers have been in harmony — ranging from the renaissance scholar Robert Burton to the avant-garde culture theorist Walter Benjamin. Since the Middle Ages, Saturn has been associated with melancholy, which in the 21st century has been almost entirely absorbed by depression as a diagnosis.

In this exhibition, I combined different media to tackle the story of Saturn at the intersection of personal and scientific, astrological and astronomical, past and present.
The centerpiece of the show was a new video work The Melancholy Mad Tenant, whose narrative oscillates around the end of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and the story of my friend ending her own life.

The exhibition was accompanied by a poem by Slovak author Juliana Sokolová titled Weeping for Cassini.

List of exhibited works:
“All those things we did not say aloud”
2022, concrete

“Looking at Saturn 1610 – 2017"
2022, archival pigment prints

“Self-portrait with a clay mask”
2022, archival pigment prints

“Things shining in the light of their imminent disappearance”
2014 - 2022, archival pigment prints

“Meeting Dürer (a travelogue)”
2022, archival pigment prints

“The Melancholy Mad Tenant”
2022, HD video, sound (in collaboration with Michal Kindernay)