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October 12th, 2008
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House of pain

An acerbic take on the Czech education system
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
July 23rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Distressed students appear in everything from line drawings to videos.
Eva Koťátková, the winner of the 2007 Jindřich Chalupecký Award, hated going to school. In her current solo show at Václav Špála, which marks the gallery’s return to its tradition of hosting the Chalupecký Award–winners’ exhibition, she not only exorcises her painful memories of the experience, but offers a critical look at the education system.
There is a curious path of black asphalt winding its way through the first room of the gallery, which leads to benches along the walls with coat hangers above them. These props recreate the atmosphere of the cloakroom of Czech grammar schools.
As you make your way to the back room, where a video is projected onto the wall, you pass a little handmade doll with extremely long arms and a backpack. It is stuck onto the wall, spotlit.
In the back room is the centerpiece of the show — a video of an older girl standing in front of a grammar school, wearing a backpack. It is early in the morning and there is no one else in sight. The video cuts to her walking to the school. Other kids join in, not walking with her but simply going in the same direction, children of all ages in groups or with their parents. Views of children are interspersed with nondescript details: plants, cracks in the sidewalk, buildings along the route.
At the end of the video, the girl arrives at the school’s entrance. She pauses in front of the school, looks in the windows with curiosity, but backs away and doesn’t enter the building.
Down in the gallery’s cellar space there is a tiny jungle gym constructed in one corner, with colorful candies stuck to it in two places. There are also four archival boxes along another wall that contain 120 drawings that can be pulled out and viewed.
The distressing subject of all the drawings is the horrors of school life. There is a sullen-looking, one-armed, one-legged boy being poked from behind by a teacher or principal. Another drawing shows a boy with spots in place of facial features who is standing on a stack of books twice as tall as he is. His back is dripping with a fluid that might be sweat, tears or blood.
In the back room, there are four projection boxes, some of them strongly resembling lecterns. The projections show individual children in torturous positions: One boy sits in a chair with his head kept in place by rods that force him to look straight ahead to read a book. Another child’s head is held in place by rods on top of her head and below her chin. Her hands are tied behind her back, seemingly locked in a box. There is no book; the child is just forced to stare straight ahead.
These video images play in a continuous loop, giving a viewer the impression that the actual staging for the videos could end up being more damaging psychologically to the child-actors than any incident that might actually take place at school.
In the hallway of the upstairs exhibition space, there is a large architectural-like drawing of a school with only a few kids inside. The children seem in distress: one is blindfolded and trying to inch forward, while another falls down the stairway. A boy and girl at each end of the structure prop up the building; both are dripping with fluid. Balloons rise from the building in the shape of faceless heads.
At the back of the room, there is a thick tube rising to the ceiling and dripping with fluid, perhaps representing the sweat or urine of terrified children. There are also more drawings. One shows a faceless girl’s head with pins stuck into it and little dots covering the face. A cube made of sticks holds the suspended head in place.
The artist clearly criticizes the educational system’s insistence on order, rules, strict divisions of time and teachers’ impersonal authority, among other things. However, the exhibition’s three floors of relentless imagery of children suffering and being tormented in school grows tiresome.
Koťátková, born in 1982, was just starting grade school at the time of the 1989 revolution. So her devastating school years didn’t occur under the communist regime. Unfortunately, teaching methods can be slower to change. And teachers who can instill horrifying memories in their students, still vivid many years later, come in all ideologies.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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