The borders of possibilities
video, 6:22 min
2012
In his works, Miroslav Hašek most frequently explores stories. In doing this, he uses various forms of medium – photography, drawings, and video. For Miroslav Hašek, a video installation means the possibility to record a story in its entirety and to process it with more complex mediums (sound, editing, the overall installation). In the first small etudes, he observes the ordinary activities of his grandmother with whom he grew up. He records activities that from a modest distance and at first glance oftentimes appear to be absurd, focusing on the visual reality and the austerity of the scene. Then in his field of vision, these banal acts stop being unimportant and begin to take on an immortal and ritual aura. In other videos, he focuses on the problem of obstacles or limitations. The person in the recording stubbornly tries to overcome his handicap, and Hašek’s gaze is just as stubbornly impressed by this ability. Because no story for him is unimportant. In addition, etudes with limitations more freely work with the symbolic nature of children’s games and puns, such as “Pretend like you don’t have arms or legs”. To what extent theses played-out limitations prepare us for the real limitations in life is again an open-ended field of action for the author. In his newest work, he continues to investigate methods of story-telling and their effect on the meaning of the overall work. The motif of a never-ending state or observing a situation from different levels conveys the difficulty of interpreting relationships, the surrounding world, as well as art in general. Emphasis is placed on the perfectly prepared scene from a visual perspective – Hašek precisely chooses the setting, the angles, the speed of the recordings, and the colour. He behaves in a similar fashion when selecting actors or amateurs – distinctive characters. The simple storyline relating to the boundaries of one relationship builds up to a point of liberation that offers us additional possibilities of explanation. His new work also for the first time takes up videos with dialogue. The dialogues between the characters are similarly ambiguous. They are the leitmotifs of other dialogues, the titles of other chapters. The video-story that Miroslav Hašek provides to the audience tells us about a frailty that goes to the core, about comical situations that move you to tears, about unpronounceable states that are time and time again formed into words.
Mgr. Eva Mráziková
KDTU FUD UJEP