Gabika Binderová (* 1975)
East Side Story, 2003
video, 9´50´´, color, sound
screenplay and direction: Gabika Binderová, camera: Miroslav Liška, Gabika Binderováfrom the collection of from the collection of the Museum of Art in Žilina
acquired by purchase from the artist in 2017
At the beginning of the zero years, Gabika Binderová established herself as the author of installations, objects and videos that communicate the nuances of the microworld of an artist, but also woman, mother of twins – boys and wife. If we want to categorize her work in connection with gender art, which declares that the category of gender is a more complex unit, is not given biologically and is more social construction, it is necessary to look at Gabika Binder’s work through the optics of marital art, which according to the artist and curator Lenka Klodová (CZ) is characterized by the fact that it originates and is realized in an institutionalized union. However, it also indicates that the topics covered by the aspect of partnership, where gender is part of a wider range of contexts associated with marriage (psychological, social and sociological factor).
Gabika Binderová’s works from the beginning of the millennium were created as her own projects, but she also often collaborated with her husband Erik Binder: Mars and Venus Binder, Kunst-fa (as Kunst family), in which they left the viewer (or gallery visitor – especially the exhibition 2JA in Municipal Gallery in Rimavská Sobota, 2001) to enter their marital microworld. They were realized mainly as installations consisting of realities from everyday life – so as to mediate the shades of the partnership, but also the physical or mental differences of its actors. In this respect, the joint (partnership-targeted) projects of Binder (now ex) spouses in our artistic environment are pioneering, and a decade later a similar art pattern, where the main code is partnership / marriage, was submitted by artists Pavlína Fichta Čierna and Anton Čierny in several joint videos from 2011 – 2012.
The video East side story is a self-portrait in the words of the artist. It reflects her family relationships, but its important element is also the sociological aspect – it shows the opposition of the periphery, where the artist comes from, and the center where she worked and lived as an artist. It is a compressed (visually compacted) road-movie capturing the journey of the Binder family from Bratislava to eastern Slovakia. In her words, it is also a metaphor for everyday life – just as the artist knows her day and its individual stops by heart, so the train from West to East and back has its own fixed and unchanging route. The plot of the film is intentionally cycled – at the end of their journey, the actors get off at the same place where they got on, as if they got nowhere, thus mixing time and space into one whole. The work was included in the collection for the exhibition Permanent Romanticism (GMB Bratislava, 2003), which presented romantic approaches in contemporary art, also at the exhibition Autopoesis (SNG Bratislava, 2006) devoted to the aspect of self-presentation, self-reflection, but also self-mythization of personality of an artist.
The acquisition of this work was supported from public sources by the Slovak Arts Council.
The purchase of this work was financed with the contribution of the Žilina self-governing region.
