Jan Mancuska: Southwest pillar and its shadow at the beginning of the novel

Descend the long staircase; the first piece, a long aluminium pole inscribed with a text, is found on the landing approximately halfway down the staircase as it makes a ninety-degree turn to the left. The pole leans against a wall that you see as you walk onto the staircase.

As you walk down the stairs and stand on the landing dominated by an Art Deco lamp, two views of the space open up to you. A fast, electronic, inhumanly rapid film montage of a naked woman descending a staircase. A young lady with short, probably bleached, blonde hair, holds her back as stiff as a board and she walks down the stairs. We see this film image from the base of the stairs to the right of the central column. If we look to the left, we see ourselves in a long and tall mirror reaching from the floor nearly to the ceiling. The dimensions of the mirror are approximately 5.5 m x 3 m. Approach the mirror; to your right, crossways to the corner of the room, is a black curtain in the shape of the letter U hanging from the ceiling. A film is playing on the space inside the letter U: a view of a landscape, a shot of a meadow, perhaps in a park. All at once the view begins to recede, disappearing inside, and we realize that we saw the view of the meadow in the mirror.

We move on along the mirror: to the left are four small projections – extremely long shots that are static in the short-term, but upon longer viewing shadows move on the ceiling, clouds pass across the sky. These are views of a civil still life – the ceiling of a room, walls, street walls, the fronts of houses.

Two of Mančuška's familiar installations are in the next room – a film of a performance in which a girl is blackening the parts of her partner's body he cannot see and a text installation first exhibited two years ago at the Berlin Biennial.

A recording of a visit to the Ján Mančuška exhibition after two weeks, by heart. The exhibition is Mančuška's first solo show in the country in five years.

Jan Mancuska
Southwest pillar and its shadow at the beginning of the novel