Before initiating Každej pes jiná ves, the artist had spent the previous two years working with her grandmother on a series of activity-oriented pieces to engage the elder Šedá. The phrase “It doesn’t matter”—Jana Šedá’s response to anything that was asked of her during a serious depression—was the inspiration for, and title of, their first collaborative work. Consisting of hundreds of detailed drawings by Jana that depict items from the hardware store where she worked from 1950 to ’83, her undertaking showed that, clearly, “things” mattered. The project was as concerned with therapeutic ends (the artist’s intention was to “resuscitate” her grandmother) as it was with picture making. While the human-interest side of It Doesn’t Matter is impressive, it is the Georges Perec-like description of a world—in this case, a hardware store and its multitudinous elements—that allows the project to transcend its specificity.

Šedá’s most recent work, Over and Over (2008), again confronts the lack of social contact between people who live in close proximity. The artist calls the piece her “most challenging to date.” Šedá began by asking 40 Brno neighbors for permission to cross the fences and walls between their homes. She negotiated with each neighbor to gain access to their yard, and participants had to come up with a mechanism that would allow the artist to easily cross the border. For the performance at the Berlin Biennale last spring (with the site of the Berlin Wall as a backdrop), her Brno collaborators helped Šedá scale a decagon-shaped wall that replicated their various fences. Two months later, a second performance back in Brno required the cooperation of twice as many neighbors, who assisted the artist in crossing approximately 100 fences. If early performance-based conceptual art employed its audience as a coconspirator—responsible for interpreting, documenting, and mythologizing the act—artists like Šedá see communication as an end in itself and its audience as a vital producer of content.

There is a significant legacy of performance-based conceptualism in the Czech Republic. Think of Jirí Kovanda’s scheduled actions and happenings in the 1970s—for example, the self-explanatory Untitled (On an escalator ... turning around, I look into the eyes of the person standing behind me...), 3 September 1977, or Contact, in which the artist wandered down the sidewalk and, as if accidentally, bumped or rubbed his shoulders into passersby. Artists of Kovanda’s generation have influenced a later generation of Czech artists, including Ján Mancuska, Jirí Skála, and Barbora Klímová. Yet Šedá’s work—with its emphasis on communal cooperation and its utopian underpinnings— is a departure from performative work of the previous generation, which was often reacting to the suppression of individuality under Communism. In contrast, Šedá’s insistence on socialization is an attempt to reveal potential conviviality and create meaningful crossings over inequalities and borders. As Šedá admits, she is interested in working with people “not in order to show problems, but to find solutions.” Her projects ultimately emphasize that participation is a choice, not a mandate— a choice that entails a constant political struggle, whether rooted in the battleground of the home, the street, or the world.

Katerina Šedá’s work is on view at Manifesta 7 in Trentino, Italy, through Nov. 2 "Introducing Katerina Šedá originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.