Exhibition: 27.10.2015-03.01.2016
Place: Gdańsk City Gallery / Günter Grass Gallery in Gdańsk
Opening: 26.10.2015, at 6 pm.
In Jaro Varga’s library, everyone can find a book they would like to read. A reader simply needs to write down its title on the ridge of a volume that lies on the shelf. Such a book collection, created together with the audience, is the result of our interests, creativity, and needs that we have towards public libraries. The library, claims the artist, is a specific construction of common knowledge that refers to its time and current ideology. In Varga’s installation, collective memory that constructs this knowledge goes in pair with individual memory, a subjective experience of a single reader. Books on the shelves of this unique collection, which was first displayed in 2008, initially embody the idea of tabula rasa. By filling it up with particular titles, the audience creates an interactive, democratic space, stripped of a material artifact. It allows the antagonistic contexts to coexist next to each other, without oppression, exclusion, or any control. The library becomes a cognitive map of visitors / citizens.
The exposition is complemented with other works by Jaro Varga, dedicated to literary threads in his creation, as well as with the premiere of his newest artist book. The exhibition is held in Günter Grass Gallery in Gdańsk – a place where literature and visual arts blend.
Jaro Varga (born in 1982 in Slovakia). Lives and works in Prague. Jaro Varga explores the phenomenon of experience as a performance by rethinking the usual forms of its representation. He creates a new choreography of viewer‘ s movement in a familiar location. This creates a quasi guidebooks for urban explorers (Urbex), through which he constructs a new topography to encourage to a new understanding of the site, which is otherwise stereotypically fixed in memory. Thus the images of the past or imaginary microconflicts retrieve in parallel worlds of the city, again to play in real time and space. His work is analytical and it is characterized by the use of the methodology of research; often statistical and cartographic aesthetics or photos, videos and installations. It relates to a new urban geography / neo-geography and moves from sociology to psycho-geography methods of urban exploration.
Jaro Varga studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, ASP Wroclaw, ABK Vienna and Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. In 2008 and 2010 he was a finalist of Oskar Cepan Award (Young Visual Artist Award). He exhibited his works at Contemporary Museum in Wroclaw, Poland (2015), MeetFactory in Prague, Czech Republic (2014), Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea (2013), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien in Berlin, Germany (2013), Prague Biennale in Czech Republic (2013), Center for Art and Urbanism in Berlin, Germany (2013), Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava, Slovakia (2012), Grazer Kunstverein, Austria (2011), Secession Vienna, Austria (2010), National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic (2010) and others.
