A vast photographic archive conceived as an extension of
Petra Feriancová's project for
the Czech and Slovak Republic Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.
An integral part of the work An Order of Things II, presented by Petra Feriancová in the Czech and Slovak Republic Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, the catalogue An Order of Things I forms the prelude, memory, inventory, extension and, above all, systematic organization of that tangible experience, those collections physically arrayed before our eyes, according to criteria the viewer slowly intuits beyond the mute nature of the images. The final pages show the sources from which the memories have been extracted, amidst film reels, slides and stacks of National Geographics, ready to be easily transported in the large Ikea shopping bags, while the others, subdivided into chapters of images, form a varied and opaque geography and anthropology of places, persons, objects, flying urban creatures, skies, ruins, sculptures. Visual notations from a more or less recent past, at times surprising, at times banal, that may evoke certain Venetian characteristics without ever making explicit reference, except in the chapter "Always the same place" that is explicitly devoted to that city. The pigeons of the section "Creator" are not just the columbae liviae that throng Piazza San Marco, but a wide range of different feathered species. The sea returns in the collection of seashells "According to Ruskin," since the English critic and artist drew some such specimens on paper in his Venetian palazzo. Venice is therefore the explicit pivot of cultural memories, but also the fulcrum of mysterious references to a submerged history. In this sense the pages – dense with amateur snapshots, scientific images, film stills and shifts of words of Feriancová – form a fascinating visual archive, but also the challenge of an extraordinary historical puzzle.
Petra Feriancová (born in 1977 in Bratislava, where she lives and works) is a Slovak contemporary artist, writer and curator. She works with the intention of post-production. The key moment of her work is the conceptualisation of her own emotional reactions to the processes of perception and memory, as well as an examination of the conditions under which they are shared. She works mostly with already made images, texts and archives, which she then interprets and methodically interchanges. The main aim of manipulating a reference—pictorial or discursive—is to provide the spectator with the original affective reaction to it.
