Adéla Součková

She introduces us to the primary philosophical wonder: why is there something rather than nothing?
Sun.
Bird.
Fish.
Cursor.
Fountain.
Root and cable.
Rooting fountain.
The spring, where the old men sit.
Eye and a positioning symbol on the map.
Profile. Profile in the landscape, profile on the Internet.
Touchscreen in animal hands whose thumbs do not stand in opposition to other fingers.
Digital Venus, who strangles all of our ancestors in her womb, the all-seeing cunt.
Localization cross. Here we are. We are here, we are here and now.
In Berlin. In Prague.

Adéla Součková creates a vocabulary of images and concepts, which she uses in her practice, in drawings on old hospital sheets, in installations, in performances. Her vocabulary is eclectic, she picks elements across different registers of knowledge. Her practice is one of eidetic thinking. It connects through relationships similarities, as Renaissance alchemists did, as an Internet image search engine does. The practice of constant repetition of drawing lets relations emerge. None of her motifs has a fixed meaning, with each iteration their signification is developed in new ways, in each new configuration with the other images.

Adéla is an artist of the Anthropocene, or perhaps it might be more accurate to mention Chthulucene, as proposed by Donna Haraway. Not an age of continuing human domination, but an age in which we are all connected across species boundaries. It is a necessity to practice interspecies communication and reciprocity, as Donna Haraway writes (Staying With the Trouble, 2016) as it is the only way to remain on the planet “living and dying together well.”

The drawings speak of distances and empty space between beings. In their uncertain charcoal lines they open up other relationships than overcoming distance by colonizing power and speed. They explore how to develop relationships across this rift with touch or caress. Adéla’s relationship to the world is all but naively innocent, realizing the inevitability with which critters murder and devour each other. We all have to acknowledge our biological determinedness. We are offered an opportunity to develop relations with the world, which are other than grasping through eyesight and intellect. Touching, caressing, groping, smelling and tasting the world, things and creatures in it. We are offered intuition as a counterweight to desiccating light of reason, offering us ways to touch the world without violence, without attempting to possess or exploit. It is in hands that Adéla displays almost obsessive interest – in human hands and in the hands of our animal kin.

From more traditional painting techniques Adéla’s emphasis shifted to performative qualities of her work. Her installations include an almost ritualistic component of drawings in situ. Adéla dances, draws with her whole body in the sacred white cube gallery space of our “always-already-contemporary” art and considers options to move beyond the totality of this present.

When using old hospital linen for her work, she talks of therapy with a conscious reference to Joseph Beuys. However, a healing process is not meant to be a return to a lost state of health, as believed by modern medical science. It’s a much more complex process, holistic and progressive. It should aims at harmonizing the relationships of the individual to the community and its environment, the ecosystem of the planet. We can not naively try to return to some kind of paradise lost, which in fact never existed. We can only try to gaze with unflinching eye to the future (however gloomy it seems) to come up again and again with the will to organize our relationships with all critters on the planet into such a shape, as to allow us all to continue story or the terran life. The repeated drawings of Adéla Součková in their multiple configurations tell mythical stories to offer us a formula for this troubled coexistence.

Radim Labuda