Sharing Moments

solo exhibition of Jasmin Schaitl
July 2023, cultural centre Zhoř (Krakovec), CZ

A word about the exhibition by curator Anna Bela Matvija M.A.

As a souvenier of her upcoming exhibition, Austrian artist Jasmin Schaitl took a moss-covered brick from Zhoř with her to Vienna. She watered and tended it on her terrace for several months. Each time she watered it, her memories brought her back here, to Zhoř, but in doing so, they also let her travel to the future, to this exhibition, which was being created at the time…

Jasmin Schaitl’s exhibition: Moments of Sharing, created for Zhoř, is a work about memory and how we perceive our past and the resulting present and future. In her work, the artist describes how remembering events defies the spatio-temporal continuum in which we operate. These memories are not ordered in a temporal sequence. Like the interwoven wire formed by the artist and visitors to the exhibition, memories find various common paths, detours and seemingly random connections.

While we remember we remain still, here and now, but our minds transport us to a place and moment in the past. We may seem to be looking at ourselves from the outside; we see ourselves as we live, as we experience a given situation. But our memory is shaped by our awareness of the consequences of the moment, where it has taken us, and what else it has caused. It may have given our next steps in life an inevitable direction.

Personally, I find this concept particularly appropriate for Zhoř. This place is still the scene of many personal stories and at the same time a witness of social changes. This place is a memento of a bygone era, of families and entire clans that rose to power and fell again. A memento of political actions and their consequences. For me personally, it carries the memory of my own family’s tragic and complex past. I therefore take Jasmin Schaitl’s call for conscious remembrance as a welcome gift to this place. I hope it will spark conversations among visitors, residents and returnees to Zhoř.

this project was co-funded by Austrian Federal Chancellery Section Art and the Austrian Cultural Forum Prague