Introducing Katerina Šedá

Jiri Skala Jiri Kovanda Summer in the City: Group Shows

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Katerina Šedá once persuaded the inhabitants of an entire town to spend a day doing the same things at the same time. She has also sent gifts to (and on behalf of) 1,000 dwellers of an apartment-building complex; asked neighbors to help her cross the fences between their homes; invited 150 people to display objects in their windowsills; and cajoled her grandmother out of a depression by encouraging her to make hundreds of drawings of the objects she once sold at a hardware store. In an effort to initiate new social relationships, the 31-year-old Czech artist has imagined, choreographed, and given shape to a number of ingeniously inspired participatory art projects involving performance, cooperation, and much negotiation. Although her projects evolve into elegant gallery and museum installations—usually featuring a mix of video, drawing, and sculpture—they invariably begin in collaboration with residents of Šedá’s native Brno, the second-largest city in the Czech Republic. The artist’s familiarity with the town and its populace is key to the success of her projects there. “I am not simply interested in making interventions but in provoking change,” Šedá notes during our recent conversation. “The provocation of such change generally requires an extended time commitment and more labor.” Šedá’s projects, which she began conceptualizing as a first-year student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2000, have become something of a phenomenon both regionally—sleepy neighboring towns have invited the artist to create projects that will enliven their own communities—and internationally. In fact, far-flung art institutions have appealed to the artist with descriptions of their local tribulations, followed by an invitation to propose and develop works in situ. “They invite me for a three-day visit to their venues and cities,” Šedá recalls, “and I am supposed to become inspired in that time and propose a project that can address one of their problems.” The artist questions whether such an undertaking is feasible. Nevertheless, it raises an intriguing question: What is it about Šedá’s work that creates expectations for the possibility of a better society?

It can be productive to approach Šedá’s practice in light of what the Danish curator Lars Bang Larsen has termed “social aesthetics”—an attitude focused on the world of acts. For Larsen, social aesthetic artwork has a utilitarian aspect that proposes direct public involvement, where collective effort is emphasized as an alternative to authoritarian structures. Similarly, Šedá works with individuals and groups to address personal or local histories endemic to her own social environment. For example, the project Každej pes jiná ves (For Every Dog a Different Master; 2007) was inspired by a 1980s-era housing complex known as Nová Líšen located on the outskirts of Brno. The building’s gray cement facades had recently been painted in various vivid colors, a beautification project administered by the aptly named Regeneration of High Rise Housing Developments committee. Intrigued by this effort to personalize architecture, Šedá decided to address the perceived lack of sociability among the complex’s residents. She designed shirts with a fabric pattern featuring the painted buildings, which she then sent to 1,000 residents—having handwritten the addresses on each of the envelopes—on behalf of their neighbors in opposite buildings.

A month later, the artist invited those same people to her exhibition at a local gallery. The invitation card stated that the exhibition dealt with Nová Líšen, and about 350 of its residents showed up at the opening. The following month, Šedá sent another letter to the residents explaining the project’s intentions and asking for comments. While many residents expressed their gratitude, several responses were critical, accusing the artist of being a dreamer and of invading their privacy. Šedá considers this last set of correspondence one of the project’s most important aspects, optimistically explaining, “The negative comments were actually the positive result of these people being approached and their opinions valued.”