#pieklokobiet #prawakobiet #peklozien #pravazien #womenshell #womensrights

Today in Poland, our friends, artists and colleagues, both women and men, protest against the ruling of the Constitutional Court that practically bans access to legal abortion. In Slovakia, other friends of ours, artists and colleagues, both women and men, engage themselves against efforts seeking stricter access to abortion. To express institutional and personal solidarity, PLATO Ostrava, a city gallery, and its team decided to address artists from Poland, Slovakia and Czech Republic to express their attitude with a visual gesture that will become part of a project placed on the gallery’s building, i.e. visible in public urban space. The name of the initiative Sand in the Gears – Piekło kobiet openly references one of the slogans of present-day protests in Poland. Let’s do what we can!

PLATO
November 2020

Agnieszka Brzeżańska (born in 1972 in Gdańsk, Poland) is a painter, photographer, ceramic maker and video artist. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and Warsaw and at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Agnieszka draws inspiration from physics, philosophy and cognitive systems marginalised by modern science: alchemy, parapsychology, esotericism, native people’s knowledge and matriarchal traditions. She is interested in religion and the presence of mysticism in everyday life and modern visual representation. Her work is feminist, matriarchal, cosmic and geocentric.

Anna Daučíková (born in 1950 in Bratislava, Slovakia) is a visual artist and teacher. She graduated from the University of Fine Arts in Bratislava. In the late 1970s she moved to Moscow to live with her then-girlfriend. Following her return, she was engaged in promoting feminist discourse in Slovakia in the 1990s and helped founding the Aspekt magazine. She taught at her alma mater and from 2013-2019 was vice-rector at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She exhibited her works at Kiev Biennale (2015) and at Kassel-Athens documenta 14. In recent years, she held solo exhibitions in Dům umění in Ústí nad Labem (2017), Slovak National Gallery (2019), and in KW Institute for Contemporary Art (2019) in Berlin.

Ladislava Gažiová (born in 1981 in Spišská Nová Ves, Slovakia) dedicates herself to painting, drawing, illustration and curatorial work. She studied at the Faculty of Arts in Košice (2000–2002) and in 2002 moved to Prague to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. A year later, she changed schools and went to AAAD from which she graduated in 2008. In the same year she was awarded the Critics’ Young Painter Prize. Lately, the focuses on curatorial work with social issues, i.e. the Roma minority and its issues, as the focal point of her work.

Alexey Klyuykov (born in 1983 in Moscow, Russia) is a painter and illustrator and a graduate of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (AAAD) in Prague. In 2010, he and Vasil Artamanov were awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. In 2016, they adhered, with other artists, to “radical realism” whose basic goal is an intelligible communication of progressive ideals. As a cartoonist and illustrator Kluyukov follows in the tradition of political caricature with an openly leftist and anti-capitalist orientation.

Eva Koťátková (born in 1982 in Prague, Czech Republic) is one of the internationally acclaimed Czech artists of her generation. Despite her relatively young age, she exhibited her works in a number of renowned institutions worldwide. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and continued her studies at the AAAD in Prague, dedicating her PhD thesis to the issue of transferring outsiders’ work into the world of art. In her work she focuses on how personality is shaped by upbringing and external environment. In 2007, she was awarded the Jindřich Chalupecký Award.

Dominik Lang (born in 1980 in Prague, Czech Republic) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and was a regular guest of Jiří David’s Studio of Intermedia Confrontation at AAAD. In his installations he reconsiders modernist tradition and combines it with contemporary means of presentation. In 2011, Lang represented the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale with his work Sleeping City, displayed together with statues by his late father, artist Jiří Lang. Since 2011, he is the head of the Studio of Sculpture at AAAD.

Jan Możdżyński (born in 1986 in Warsaw, Poland) graduated from the Studio of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and from the Faculty of Law at the Warsaw University. In his work Możdżyński deals with issues related to gender identity, cultural relations and their meaning, and stigma related to sexual preferences. He aims at capturing situations related to role plays and destroying what is traditionally viewed as feminine or masculine. He also dedicates himself to box and offers box classes to his friends.

Kateřina Olivová (born in 1982 in Znojmo, Czech Republic) is a performer, artist, curator, feminist and mother. She graduated from the Studio of Body Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. In 2018, she was one of the finalists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award; she is now the head of the New Media II Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In her work, she deals with the issues of corporeality, sexuality, feminism, emotions and relationships, maternity and breastfeeding. She is the founder of Breastfeeding Guerrilla, an activist group promoting breastfeeding. With artist Darina Alster she founded Mothers Artlovers, a support group for mothers-artists.

Alois Stratil (born in 1980 in Olomouc, Czech Republic) is a graduate of the Studio of Intermedia at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. His main means of expression is drawing. In Stratil’s work, this medium seems to have endless possibilities. In his cycles of drawings he dedicated himself to repeating motives and different moods; gentle provocation follows an enveloping honesty and self-ironic narcissism, sadness, ephemerality and eternity. His iconographic eclectics connect with meditative focus. Alois Stratil often works with his partner Kateřina Olivová.

Dominika Olszowy (born in 1987 in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland) graduated from the Faculty of Intermedia at the University of Arts in Poznań. She is a visual artist, co-author of several collective art initiatives that include feminist rap group and motorcycle gang. Olszowy is also author of stage designs and theatre performances.

Tomasz Mróz (born in 1979 in Opole, Poland) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. He co-founded the art group PENERSTWO. He is author of large multimedia installations that involve silicone sculptures, film screenings and sound elements. In his work, Mróz makes use of caricature and grotesque; the alternative reality he creates is kept in a disturbing surrealist poetics.