Barbora Kropáčková↓

About the work

The installation by Barbora Kropáčková presents a video projected into a complicated geometric space and combined with a literary text, glass objects, and music. The interconnection of these features reflects the complexity of the artist’s message: the tragic fate of the Sudetenland is simultaneously a background against which the history of her family developed, while the depressing present of the region is linked with historical traumas and the problems of the world of today – as if, for instance, the ecological crisis or national intolerance merely echoed what happened there in the latter half of the 20th century. The changes of time moreover affected the local glassmaking tradition, symbolized for the artist by her granddad. The scenes accompanying the emotional, contemplatively conceived text, mainly originate from the city of Nový Bor, where Kropáčková grew up, and Ústí nad Labem, where she lives now. Some directly refer to the places of both past and recent tragedies, among them the Edvard Beneš Bridge and Matiční Street in Ústí and a bar in Nový Bor, infamous for the 2011 machete attack, which resulted in race unrest.