Lenka Klodová
area: Visual arts, performance, art research
Key Facts
nationality
Czech Republicarea
Visual arts, performance, art researchresidence
Sluhyrecommending institution
tranzit.org / ERSTE Stiftungtime period
May 2022 - June 2022Lenka Klodová studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design /AAAD/ in Prague. Originally a sculptor, she works with various media, preferring conceptual forms of creation – photography, instalation, performance and art research.
Her research focuses on the visual presentation of human relationships and on the relation between art, human (especially female), sexual experience and pornography.
She received a Ph.D. in art research on pornographic magazine for women. Since 2010 she became a head of the Body Design Studio at Faculty of Fine Art, Brno University of Technology. Her favorite academic and artistic topic is human nudity as a natural state of the body on one side and as a political gesture on the other. Recently, her book Naked Situations – a guide to the most important naked moments in contemporary society and a catalogue of her works with nudity was published. She directs the Festival of Naked Forms in Prague– an experimental platform to test the understanding of nudity in performance art and the humanities.
Two years ago, I managed to buy the complete archive of the erotic magazine Leo, which began to be published in the Czech Republic in 1990, two months after the Velvet Revolution. As a former active participant in the Velvet Revolution, I see the erotic magazine Leo as a specific testimony to the social changes that have taken place in our country since the 1990s. In my opinion, the content and visual changes of Leo magazine can illustrate in a fascinating way the transformation of Czech society from enthusiastic, ambitious, but rather naive beginnings to a monotonous form of a real capitalist product. The possession of this archive provokes me very much to find an artistic form of working with this material and a generally artistic form of research work with the archive. The solutions will not only include material artworks based on the analysis of the archive, but also performative interpretations of my archive. The MQ residence in Vienna would give me time and space to focus on this challenging project.
At the same time, I think that my knowledge in this area and the presentation of partial outputs could be interesting for other artists and researchers interested in the transformation processes in Central Europe.
The magazine Leo was founded immediately after the Velvet Revolution as a dream image of the liberating power of eroticism as one of the elements of a free society. This idea was formed by the socialist population for lack of further impulses from the erotic industry on the basis of several smuggled and hand-to-hand circulating erotic magazines from the West, including Austria. It would therefore be interesting to find certain connections or patterns in this regard in the Vienna archives.