Bring Me a Flower, I Will Reward You

Wha-wha-what did you say?
Oh, you're breaking up on me
Sorry, I cannot hear you
I'm kinda busy
K-kinda busy
K-kinda busy
Sorry, I cannot hear you
I'm kinda busy
– Lady Gaga, Telephone (2009)

The characters in Dominika Dobiášová’s latest canvases, which the author is presenting publicly for the first time at Zaazrak|Dornych, wander uncertainly through the wide monochromatic corridors of Bentham’s panopticons of the working environment, offices, companies, and institutions, in whose detached, complex and hard to explain rules and spatial layouts, their actors struggle to orientate. Undergoing an institutional experience resembles a perverted ritual of hierarchies and competencies: those who do not navigate the inhuman language of rules, instructions, and their interrelation are systematically ridiculed, humiliated, and excluded from this office microworld.

Only the one who demonstrates submission, loyalty, and self-initiative in learning how to understand this labyrinth can be step by step rewarded with gradual acceptance into it. In the paintings, this aspect emphasizes the use of the rarely seen archaism of hieratic perspective, as we know it from Egyptian friezes, where it performed the same function. The main figures of this cycle, be they individuals, couples, groups, men or women, across the individual paintings are undergoing this initiation in the backdrop of the palaces of Kafka’s hyper-bureaucracy, whose decoration, reminiscent of the monoliths of Jaroslav Róna’s America with Martin Dejdar, reflects in relief the forms of the former creators of these rules and the current guardians of their status quo.

Despite the initial feelings of inadequacy, subjugation, misunderstanding, control, and surveillance, the characters slowly learn to understand these established processes and as they accumulate symbolic credit represented by the meadow flower, this world ceases to be alien and hostile to them, until gradually they almost even forget that it ever used to be like that. As a result, they may feel accepted into this world, rewarded by it by regaining the comfort they once lost because of it, which is ultimately comforting. Everything is on the right track, things are as they should be. The question is: Aren’t they losing themselves and each other at the same time?

Curated by Šimon Kadlčák