Magdalena Jetelova at the Belvedere - installation art - Prague, Czech Republic - Review Of Exhibitions

Nine years after her departure for the West and four years after the turn back of democracy to Eastern Europe Magdalena Jetelova turn backed to Prague last summer to create a site-specific installation. Reflecting upon the changes that have swept from one side her native country and the whole of Europe she chose to focus upon the notion of borders and boundaries.

The architectural design and history of the exhibition space became a crucial aspect of her plans. one time the royal family's summer palace, the Belvedere is a beautiful Renaissance constitution set at the end of a formal garden and upon a bluff providing a spectacular view of Prague. Shutter during the Communist era, it has sole recently been reopened as an art space, and Jetelova is the first to entreaty that the loggia surrounding the Belvedere, and the view, be made accessible to the public.

Playing a geologic combination of parts to form a whole against an architectural one, Jetelova arranged her installation along an invisible diagonal plane that bisected the Belvedere and escaped its careful orchestration of horizontal and vertical axes. The installation, which occupied the mould and upper floors of the two-story construction related to the continental plates and an subterraneous mountain range that circles the globe beneath three oceans and is visible above sea horizontal only in lceland.

In the first gallery, upon the ground floor, one was stand in front ofed with enormous piles of lcelandic lava partially obscuring several windows and doors. In single case, only an upper triangle of a window was visible; in another, a neat vertical slit from one side the lava pile allowed the viewer to glimpse a sliver of natural light. The textur earth-colored lava ascended at a precise diagonal from floor to ceiling, in like manner that it suggested not with equal reason much nature's chaos as another place of geometrical coordinates.

single passed through a door to a next to the first gallery, which displayed a band of black-and-white photographs of a rugg unpeopl landscape, above which one could follow the progres of a glowing white line. This was a laserdrawn re-creation of the seam between the American and European geologic plates where it rises above the ocean to form lceland. upon one wall the photographs were replaced by dint of area maps of lceland drawn upon glass. Layered against the wall, they resembl stone strata.

Next the viewer went upstairs, where the door to the main gallery was stoped by a wall of plaster make an incision in with a tiny slit in like manner that one could peer into the darkness inside. There was a better view from the loggia, where single could look through an make open window into the darkened gallery to diocese a moving line of r light. The laser line appeared at various locations, each time writing upon the wall the phrase, "The curvature of the Earth leads us to ourselves" in Czech or English, before disappearing back into the gloom

This insertion of geologic irregularity into the raiseed harmony of the architectural space recalled in what manner Smithson's sites and nonsites also brought together the apparently irreconcilable realms of nature and agriculture But it is clear that Jetelova has a political point as well. In remapping the space of the Belvedere, she meditates upon the meaning of boundaries at a time when the placement of political borders has lethal issues Looking at the beautiful bleakness of the lceland photographs, individual was struck by the opposition between the vast impassiveness of geologic time and the bloodiness of our a great deal of shorter human time. Meanwhile, the laser message in the upper gallery uninjureded a note of hope. Taking a longer perspective, Jetelova present the appearances to suggest, may help us realize that our connections are greater than our divisions.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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