Politicum of life. Family/From the Archive of Kveta Fulierova

The private domestic space becomes a political one; and those everyday moments become historical.
This show and the book are both the attempts at grasping an important part of Květa Fulierováʼs archive, which holds a selection of negatives and printed black and white photographs stowed away in envelopes, marked according to themes and sorted chronologically in chocolate boxes. These photographs pertain to the everyday of a family; of her shared household with Július Koller from the period starting in the eighties, when Květaʼs grandsons were born, and ending in their adulthood and the passing away of Július Koller in 2007.
The archive disposes of an ability to reverse a situation, which can appear to be commonplace and ordinary, into something significant, something that endures. It is an endless documentation that, as if, became her everyday necessity. Even when nothing as such happens, this “nothing” has the same significance to the passage of time; the same meaning as “everything”.
While upholding the chronological arrangement of the archive I discovered themes that would repeat; categories, which would only makes sense and regain their full beauty once they were re­arranged. That is how the thematic chapters “Cactuses” “With pictures”, “In front of the building” or “On the balcony” came to be.
The photographs mostly depict a slight manipulation with the photographed object or spontaneously arranged situations, which transpired, if only out of a lack of space or at the occasion of a blooming cactus.
In the case of J and K one has to understand the space of their flat, their family life and their work as one solid entity.
My relationship to the content of Květaʼs archive comes out of a finderʼs perspective and my own ideal projections of it. (In this case it relates to my childhood.) Personal photographs tend to be the most universal – they provide enough space and at the same time enough distance. Perhaps they make the ideal research material.
Květa Fulierováʼs photographs can be understood as measure, a document of a quarter of what it is to be human – a platform of our ability to relate to this material as if a base or a resource – just as it was for many of Kollerʼs key works. Or as a material of endless alternatives of organization, ordering, regrouping and thus creating new Universes and FAMILIES.

Supported by Slovak Arts Council.