We can read the body instantly. Sex, age, damage, strength. Just a glance is enough for anybody to decode another person. There is no doubt that a pregnant woman also presents such a snap message, one that makes her even more understandable for others than she probably is for herself in that moment.
During her pregnancy, Jana Kasalová started to trace changes of her own body, most probably because she was astonished that she was suddenly being read on this basis. This recording somehow evokes the image of a typographer studying carefully how the shape of one letter gently transforms into another that may be similar, yet have an altered meaning.
The question of what is really happening here soon naturally approaches the very boundaries of that which humans alone can address. The questions cannot be answered because the female body that is changing and the male body that changed it are nothing more than intermediaries. Individual bodies give the impression of characters that obediently compose a kind of a text that has been written from time immemorial and sounds to us like eternal law. At Jana Kasalová’s exhibition, fragments of sentences from the first chapters of the Book of Genesis and from the Ten Commandments, presented as an attempt to catch sight of the beginning of our civilisation, are set in a direct counterpart to the copied bodies. Two- and three-word phrases emerge from a boundless graphic sea like embryonic clusters that will only gradually develop into more complex messages.
However, the state in which a woman finds herself when bringing a child into the world is definitely not a state of distant intellectual detachment. On the contrary, it is accompanied with an irrepressible need to immediately and physically enter the mind. It is as if the one who is drawing would be simultaneously drawn, and the one who is writing would be written concurrently.
When trying to draw and write with her own breast milk in the first months after giving birth, Jana Kasalová was not driven by any effort for shocking originality. It was an irresistible preoccupation with the substance that remained as a direct echo of the body, whether serving as a visual gesture or a verbal message. Through this, the artist was able to convincingly experience her presence in her artwork, which she could hardly have under her control otherwise. It is not by circumstance that the most coherent of the inscriptions looks as if she were impressing upon herself: “I do not have any need to combine. I must concentrate.”
Jaromír Typlt, Exhibition Curator