The Backward Mirrors

Petra Hermanová and Jiří Thýn: The Backward Mirrors

The exhibition was open from 28.05.2013 to 5.7.2013 in Studio Kostelní.

The first exhibition in Studio Kostelní called The Backward Mirrors reacts to the production The Black Mirrors by Katharina Schmitt based on the literary work of the German novelist of the after-war period, Arno Schmidt. The Black Mirrors tells a post-apocalyptic story of a man, the last human being on the planet Earth, who has survived the Third World War. In his loneliness and empty routine of his lonesome days, he tries to grasp the present through relics of the past. One day he finds a hope – a woman/mannequin – and tries to bring her to life with his longing for a living creature.

The Backward Mirrors exhibition is the result of the meeting of a young artist and musician, Petra Hermanová, and an experienced artist working mainly with photographs, Jiří Thýn. The viewer/the last human being on Earth is presented with a series of suggestive self-portraits of Hermanová linked through the leitmotif of a face covered in hair. The photographs are projected on a screen hanging in the air. The final visualization of the creature is left to the audience and their imagination. The original title of the series of the self-portraits that Hermanová launched in 2009, was I Became a Monster; now it is presented as A diary… Both titles are significant for the theme of our exhibition, expressing the urgency of seclusion. The projection is accompanied by a well-known organ composition, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 by J.S. Bach, but Jiří Thýn is using it in a reversed version. The original work was presented in the Panna Marie at the Náměti Church in Kutná Hora in 2009. The version presented in Studio Kostelní is played in midi format, whose precision reflects the thinking of a lonely man who is trying to build new stories on the ruins of the lost civilization. He is going back in time, remembering, playing something that is well known, which cannot bring back the same experience.

Curator: Tereza Sochorová Horáková

We would like to express our thanks to Lukáš Vendl and Jakub Potoček.

Works presented:

Petra Hermanová, A diary… 2009 – 2013

Jiří Thýn, Reversed Harmony, organ concert, J.S. Bach Toccata and Fugue, BWV 565

Reversed transcription of a score for an organ concert by J.S. Bach; Performed by Michal Hanuš, 3.8.2009, Panna Marie at the Náměti Church, Kutná Hora. 2009 (2009/2013 transcribed in midi version)