Robin Seidl↓

About the work

somewhere in the time, is hiding a beautiful day

Although I was born in Prague, I feel that having gotten acquainted with art through the experience of living in Ústí nad Labem has been essential to me and my work. It brought me closer to realizing how privileged people like me are how many notions about the reach of contemporary art are completely out of touch. For that, I admire all the people who live in Ústí while creating great, independent contemporary art there.

I spent my entire studies at AVU mostly in distance mode, which was not exactly to my liking, but I see it as a positive, becoming kind of independent of the institution, a test of what might await me after my graduation.

Therefore, my thesis is just another stage of the process that I have been undergoing lately. My method of working that I wish to stick to – to see my work as a long-term process in which something grows under my hands and I strive to figure out what it is. I always try to work in relation to my previous experience and observations. What is important to me is the creation of a kind of performative framework in which the work emerges. Once it is finished, there comes a phase of observation of what is happening with the reality that the work is in and where it wants to go next. I am not always completely in control and I do not always enjoy it, sometimes I get downright anxious about the work proper and all the romantic joy of making it disappears. Thus, I often observe reality turning into a rather inhospitable environment, an environment to which one is indifferent.

It is like waking up every day and watching the flowers grow by my window, checking that the soil is not too dry or too wet, that the direct sun is not burning the leaves too much, that the water for watering is the right temperature and mineral content. And I hope the flower will live. But what they will grow into, how big, and whether they might accidentally gobble up all my space afterwards, this is what I leave up to them. I approach my work in the same way, watching how it grows, what it produces, what kind of environment it creates.

I feel that I am strongly influenced in my thinking by a kind of dystopian, often ironic mood towards the world. This stems largely from my having read and watched so many dystopian sci-fi books and films that captivated me with their broad descriptions of human failings. Therefore, in each of my works my goal is to perceive the changing meanings of the materials use, to see the material not only as a means of representation but also as an object with its own meanings and context. I keep asking myself whether creating more and more new things even makes any sense.