EXHIBITION: Markéta Adamcová: Noise of a Dense Life

curated by: Natálie Kubíková, Mia Milgrom

29.6. – 31.7. 2024

ENG// Markéta Adamcová’s exhibition, “Noise of a Dense Life,” delves into the themes of mortality, generational trauma, and corporeal vulnerability. Her work highlights the importance of understanding history and family constellations as key factors in understanding our current state and behavior. The work reflects not only the physical side of organisms but also their mental and emotional components. Through abstract forms and color combinations, it seeks to express the complexity of life and its various phases and transformations. The exhibition “Noise of a Dense Life” is thus a metaphorical response to the processes that accompany the existence and extinction of every living creature. Through her work as a painter and poet, Markéta Adamcová transforms these personal situations and narratives into vivid colors and genuine words.

“A Movement,” a poem written by Adamcová, places us in a garden as observers of the everlasting but cyclical life within it. The bugs, the smells, the weather—each movement perpetuates the next, existing without regard to our pains or histories. Her writing mirrors losing track of time or even losing oneself to solitude, understanding both alienation and the deep familial interdependencies.

Markéta Adamcová explores generational trauma and inherited pain that ripple through families and communities across vast spaces through the ideas of Judith Butler, Gabor Maté, and poets such as Etel Adnan and John Donne. She talks about her personal loss and numbness in connection to the atrocities we are collectively allowing as humanity. Butler similarly asks us to consider which lives are deemed grievable and whose suffering is acknowledged. Her work underscores the ethical imperative to recognize the value of all lives and to mourn and heal collectively. “Capacious care,” a term introduced in “The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence” (Verso, 2020), places importance on caring for strangers and distant others, advocating for a universal care that “cultivates and prioritizes the social, institutional, and political facilities that enable and enhance our capacities to care for each other and the natural world.”

The author draws from literature, visual arts, and natural motifs, which in her interpretation are intertwined on paper collages, drawings, or large, colorful canvases through abstract figures and organic shapes. What we consider solid matter here is perforated, and what is supposed to be as fragile as a leaf, on the contrary, represents the strongest link between the interwoven images. The mutually revealing layers on the canvases allow their depth to permeate, so we can observe several scenes at once, as if we were rapidly watching the growth of a stem from the soil and at the same time its withering and decay. Everything grows through and mixes, the canvases connect and refer to each other as well as to parts of the author’s poems. A tiny fly under the painter’s microscope gleams in several color spectrums right before our eyes, while we try to figure out if it will ever take flight again.