Snowball, ( 11 December 2014- 7 March 2016)
Mira Gáberová
Fridge
Fridge Gallery, from 2009-... social project.
In 2008, I moved into an apartment at Šancová street and I inherited a fridge from my grandmother, Mária Mullerová. It was difficult to fit the fridge in the space of the apartment and I was moving it from one place into another. It became a sort of solitary object in space. Subsequently in 2009, the first somewhat unplanned exhibition on the Fridge took place. Together with Mária Bodorová, we attached her paintings that were created during the evening on 8. 3. 2009 with magnets to the Fridge and thus we were holding a small private vernissage.
The Fridge made an impression over me as an object in different households. Fridges serve as place where people usually attach shopping lists, leave messages or important information in order to be certainly found. This is a place of your apartment that you will surely stumble on. Here, people usually allocate their family pictures, holiday postcards, child paintings and, of course, the main content is represented by food. How attractive it is to open your fridge just to see what we are hungry for.
I strived to combine these aspects in the Fridge project – Fridge as a space, object, gallery (white box) as well as foods and drinks connected with a presentation and vernissage. This is why I started to invite artists, who created very interesting artworks and concepts on / in / with the Fridge. These artworks and concepts were presented during my private home vernissage – a party with invited people, full of foods and drinks.
Mira Gáberová
Fridge
Fridge Gallery, from 2009-... social project.
In 2008, I moved into an apartment at Šancová street and I inherited a fridge from my grandmother, Mária Mullerová. It was difficult to fit the fridge in the space of the apartment and I was moving it from one place into another. It became a sort of solitary object in space. Subsequently in 2009, the first somewhat unplanned exhibition on the Fridge took place. Together with Mária Bodorová, we attached her paintings that were created during the evening on 8. 3. 2009 with magnets to the Fridge and thus we were holding a small private vernissage.
The Fridge made an impression over me as an object in different households. Fridges serve as place where people usually attach shopping lists, leave messages or important information in order to be certainly found. This is a place of your apartment that you will surely stumble on. Here, people usually allocate their family pictures, holiday postcards, child paintings and, of course, the main content is represented by food. How attractive it is to open your fridge just to see what we are hungry for.
I strived to combine these aspects in the Fridge project – Fridge as a space, object, gallery (white box) as well as foods and drinks connected with a presentation and vernissage. This is why I started to invite artists, who created very interesting artworks and concepts on / in / with the Fridge. These artworks and concepts were presented during my private home vernissage – a party with invited people, full of foods and drinks.
Mira Gáberová
Fridge
Fridge Gallery, from 2009-... social project.
In 2008, I moved into an apartment at Šancová street and I inherited a fridge from my grandmother, Mária Mullerová. It was difficult to fit the fridge in the space of the apartment and I was moving it from one place into another. It became a sort of solitary object in space. Subsequently in 2009, the first somewhat unplanned exhibition on the Fridge took place. Together with Mária Bodorová, we attached her paintings that were created during the evening on 8. 3. 2009 with magnets to the Fridge and thus we were holding a small private vernissage.
The Fridge made an impression over me as an object in different households. Fridges serve as place where people usually attach shopping lists, leave messages or important information in order to be certainly found. This is a place of your apartment that you will surely stumble on. Here, people usually allocate their family pictures, holiday postcards, child paintings and, of course, the main content is represented by food. How attractive it is to open your fridge just to see what we are hungry for.
I strived to combine these aspects in the Fridge project – Fridge as a space, object, gallery (white box) as well as foods and drinks connected with a presentation and vernissage. This is why I started to invite artists, who created very interesting artworks and concepts on / in / with the Fridge. These artworks and concepts were presented during my private home vernissage – a party with invited people, full of foods and drinks.
Mira Gáberová
Fridge
Fridge Gallery, from 2009-... social project.
In 2008, I moved into an apartment at Šancová street and I inherited a fridge from my grandmother, Mária Mullerová. It was difficult to fit the fridge in the space of the apartment and I was moving it from one place into another. It became a sort of solitary object in space. Subsequently in 2009, the first somewhat unplanned exhibition on the Fridge took place. Together with Mária Bodorová, we attached her paintings that were created during the evening on 8. 3. 2009 with magnets to the Fridge and thus we were holding a small private vernissage.
The Fridge made an impression over me as an object in different households. Fridges serve as place where people usually attach shopping lists, leave messages or important information in order to be certainly found. This is a place of your apartment that you will surely stumble on. Here, people usually allocate their family pictures, holiday postcards, child paintings and, of course, the main content is represented by food. How attractive it is to open your fridge just to see what we are hungry for.
I strived to combine these aspects in the Fridge project – Fridge as a space, object, gallery (white box) as well as foods and drinks connected with a presentation and vernissage. This is why I started to invite artists, who created very interesting artworks and concepts on / in / with the Fridge. These artworks and concepts were presented during my private home vernissage – a party with invited people, full of foods and drinks.
When Mira asked us to write a text about our participation in “Chladnička Miry Gaberovej” in Praha, we were mainly interested in our artistic practice articulating a discourse around the consequences of current consumption in our society.
For us the participation in the projectof Mira Gaberova stimulated reflection on how to influence the consumption of listening an art work in a private space. A private space, where happens a transformation of the social ecosystem of its own environment to address the exhibition of an art work outside the institutional framework in which contemporary art is normally shown, as an excuse to discuss this issue with an existing refrigerator in an apartment. We approach the idea of overproduction from the concept giving the fridge the status of objetual work to avail ourselves of not having to produce a new one. Thus we understand that the appropriation of the refrigerator as listening object can result in factors to understand the consumption of such work as a formula of power. The power to consume an artistic work over and over again through the same object and through collaborations with other artists before and after us.
"At home at someone else’s place."
The site-specific "After the Wham!" is an allegory to notoriously known hit Last Christmas – reflected infinitely in the loneliness of an empty fridge.
The exposition project Fridge by Mira Gáberová provided the location where I could shoot a video that was planned for exposition Collection of Essays {assignee Edith Jeřábková] in the Entrance Gallery, Prague.
So, I didn’t introduced the final realization, but a reaction to a specific situation. In this case, the fridge itself represented an observer of visitors who found themselves in opposing situation. They became objects of interest. Among other things, all participants were captured on the final video.
The text – Typing machine
In the video there is a girl typing a short text that describes the situation we are looking at - i.e. a girl typing on a typing machine.
A serious plot, or a plot giving a serious impression, further supported by scenic elements (typing machine, a picture of pigeon cut out from veiling) ends up ironically as the camera finds itself on the other side of the scene behind the curtain, showing a group of people (not actors in this case) who are watching all this process.
My project was quite different from the others. Not only it used the fridge as a special “exhibit area”, but it was also a reference/”teaser” to another exposition jointly prepared by Mira, Katka Poliačiková and me („never-ending moment before my end“ ) – a fusion of our three approaches to the commonly prepared project.
There was a picture of me installed in the fridge displaying how I am gazing at a rose “hibernated” in that very fridge while the rose itself was placed in front of the picture. The documentation (or the ultimate work) consists of two photos – the first one - hanged in the fridge, and the second one - where I’m looking at the whole installation in the fridge.
I have appropriated certain approaches used by Mirka and Katarína in their work and combined them into a single work. For a visitor to the vernissage the work was a mystery with interpretation boundaries considerably restricted. Visitors were forced to “jump into the future” to make themselves capable of handling individual messages and connotations. I freeze and conserve this silent (as if not addressing a spectator) moment (->Mira Gáberová) and compress it into a vertical composition of parallel time frames (->Katarína Poliačiková).
SK Product name: Majolenka v chladničke Miry Gáberovej
Composition: Majolenka, whose characteristics reach the highest quality, has a rich visual consistence and excellent artistic exposal. It’s made of special ingredients, such as gender, feminism and “found footage”. It contains important elements that are essential in order to perceive art in a positive way. Majolenka provides human organisms with the following vitamins: A (such as AHA effect), E such as (endorphin) and K (such as catharsis).
Preparation instruction: All foods must be consumed before the day of expiration!
Mass: Majo+55kg
Mass: 55kg+lenka
Country of Origin: Czech Republic,
Country of Origin: Slovak Republic
Date of Expiration: 02.07.2010
Sound, happening
Peter Berényi created for Mirka’s exposition a sound track consisted of favourite party-songs regularly interrupted by the noise of a fridge. Intervals of shrill, overexposed sound of the fridge electromotor with characteristic clicks at the beginning and end of each cycle copied a running-idle cycle of the fridge motor. Each 40 minutes the visitors of the event were exposed to 20 minutes of that awkward sound. It irritated the visitors who were thus looking forward to its end so that they could carry on with their amusement.
Peter Barényi, as a regular visitor to the fridge expositions by Mira Gáberová, reacted to the fact that he knows the atmosphere of the exposition very well and, further, that these exhibitions became such an event where a narrow group of people often meets together – the people who know each other and thirst for some “bang-up” friday party.
"All in all, it's just another brick in the wall."
2, magnetism, the Earth, fields, gravity, metal, 2.
The Fridge project was spontaneously inspired by the primary function of the device; that is to store foodstuff.
Firs, we created with Mirka a list of guests who were invited to the vernissage. After that, I asked Mirka to empty her fridge on the day of vernissage and leave it ready for use. Based on the guest-list I asked every invited guest to bring something from his own fridge to that of Mirka. The choice was upon everyone to fetch around what he would find appropriate. At the end of the project Mirka’s fridge got partially filled up and changed its contents in such way that it was suddenly different than before.
Defrost
I put a small plushy doe filled with water into empty white fridge and left it in a freezer for one day. During the exposition the door was open and the water melted slowly in the doe. diorama was supplemented with two pictures of nature attached right to inner side of the fridge. The illumination i the fridge represened the artic sun.
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There is a small animal standing in the empty fridge, proudly rising its head over the ice-berg of white plastic. However, my little diorama is slowly changed. As the evening comes to doe s proundness dimidhes to the prostration. The legs falter and the head goes down.
András Cséfalvay
For me the instalation on Mirkas fridge was like a pre-Christmas visitation to her place with traditional Chrismas-like lighting adorment put into a geometrical shape. My point was to make an unpretentious lighting output, such as that used by people during the Christmas time to decorate their houses.
Erik Šille
As I was among the first people to take part in the fridge exposition, my controbution was sort of a joke. It was an immediate reaction to Mirkas challenge, as well as to the character and title of the event, which sounded very spontaneous to me. The idea of exposition on the fridge turned out to be a viable idea and lived to see a couple of serious expositions. This is why I was happy to be a part of it for a while.
Monika Pascoe Mikyšková
First Fridge.
