Katarína Dubovská: [response_ability]

Curated by Julia Eckert

Which new perspectives on society and potentials for artistic practice arise if we don’t take humans and their environment to be statically separate but caught in dynamic processes characterised by an interweaving of human actions, technologies, and non-human beings?

Feminist theorist Karen Barad uses the term response-ability (the ability to respond) to describe the possibility of mutual resonance between human and non-human actors closely interlinked within a fluid data network. Following this post-anthropocentric and post-humanist approach, the exhibition [response_ability] presents mostly new works from Katarína Dubovskás most recent group of works Intertwined Conditions which investigate the agency of matter in complex ways.

As a basis for her artistic practice, Katarína Dubovská uses her ever-growing personal (digital) image archive which draws from the digitally generated floods of images that are constantly pouring down on us via social media. Experimenting with various imaging techniques as well as the dissolving and plastic re-building of image material through her own hybrid methods, she artistically researches this archive. In her post-photographic approach, she leaves behind any referential function of photography in favour of a conceptual and sculptural use of the medium. Pictorial elements are extracted, dissected, fragmented, dissolved, and liquefied, printing inks are extracted, the material is re-configured and re-formed through haptic, technological, and discursive examinations. Pre-existing materials are used as breeding ground for new formations, assemblages, and perspectives. Katarína Dubovská thus raises media-reflexive questions concerning a post-photographic practice while also discussing more sustainable ways of artistic production and the circulating of resources. In her works, Katarína Dubovská challenges us to disengage ourselves from what is established and to ask ourselves which new realities and concepts of society we want to shape and are capable of shaping.