Kateřina Šedá is a nonconformist artist. She never particularly wanted to have her own exhibition; she just wants to create her “crazy” social projects. In spite of that, she is preparing to present her works at one of the most prestigious venues for international art, the Tate Modern in London.
Catherine Wood, the curator at the Tate Modern, has sought out Šedá after seeing her work at various Czech presentation of Czech art abroad, and she offered to work with her. “She visited me sometime in February. Next month I will go to London to see what sort of space I could have,” says Šedá.
“I really liked her work at the exhibitions Document and Manifest,” says Wood, confirming that the Šedá’s solo exhibit will take place. Either in autumn or next year.
Thirty-two-year-old Šedá would only be the second Czech artist to have a solo show at the Tate.
In 2007 Jiří Kovanda, a performer and a favourite teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, had an exhibition at the Tate and this ended up cementing his big comeback. The fifty-six-year-old artist began creating performance art in public spaces in the 1970s without having any international context. At the Tate Modern he presented Polibek (the Kiss) in 2007, where he used shy gestures to attract passers by at the gallery to allow themselves to be kissed through a glass wall.
Šedá’s, who has succeeded in recruiting dozens of volunteers for her most recent works, will be presenting a substantially more challenging piece of work.
At last year’s Berlin bieanale, she brought a busload of neighbours from the Brno suburb of Líšeň. In one of Berlin’s parks, she set up make-shift fences that separated the Líšeň residents. The neighbours brought their own gardening materials, barrels, tubs and buckets, and using these tools (with the assistance of German journalists), they symbolically climbed over these fences to reach one another.
The performance was Šedá’s several-week-long effort to bring neighbours together and in Berlin acquired another type of interpretations: a reference to the Berlin Wall. “I didn’t even think of that, but in the end it all fell into place,” she Šedá, adding she hopes a similar connection will emerge with project for the Tate in London.
“They gave me free rein and I am still deciding what I will make for London,” she says. Šedá does not like to repeat herself. “I will not bring Czechs to London or Londoners here, as they suggested I could do at the Tate,” says Šedá.
Her project could touch upon an idea that has been floating around in her mind for a while. “A very topical issue is, in my opinion, the baby boom. No one has looked at it yet from an angle that didn’t assume it was annoyingly cute and infantile. I would probably like to connect it to the theme of the elderly and meeting the meeting of generations that are far apart,” says Šedá, who is herself a freshly-minted mother.
Šedá studied at the academy because she wasn’t able to realise her projects anywhere else. In 2005 she received the Jindřich Chalupecký award. Inadvertently, she has been able to convey something new in contemporary art. “The social interventions of Kateřina Šedá fit into current international trends. But there is nothing calculating about that. She simply does things that really matter to her and that she understands,” says art critic Tomáš Pospiszyl. Šedá also doesn’t like to make compromises. Recently, for example, she turned down an offer from Tate Liverpool. “The wanted me to create something in their city. But I don’t know how to work on commission like that.”
