Jan Durina – To Stop Watching a Catastrophe

23. 11. 2022

Jan Durina & Miriama Kardošová (Romeo & Hellion), Additional Feel, performance, 2021, Photo: Natália Zajačiková

Hidden behind a tree, bound, in the mist, flowing through an icy waterfall. Jan Durina is an intermedia artist who has, for several years now, worked with music, performance, and textiles. His most recent works feature expressive costumes and embroidered tapestries that reach into the territories of objects or environments. He is often mentioned in the contexts of photography, which continues to be a crucial element in his work, a thread that binds it all together from his beginnings as an artist.

His visual style evokes Baroque motifs, symbolism, art brut, authenticity, folklore, references to works by various artists, musicians, writers, art theorists, and psychologists. His works are unsettling in their gloomy visuality and occultist and (homo)erotic charge, awakening ancient magical and folk rituals connected to the post-aesthetics of contemporary art and the poetics of naturism. The hand-embroidered masks that often appear in his works cover one’s face, thus maintaining the fragile anonymity and intimacy of the participants. Their dynamic colorfulness, materiality, the motifs of death, sharp teeth, various body parts, and the general interconnectedness and stitching together seems hypnotic, as does the deep, searching, and direct stare emanating from behind them. The voice, music, eye contact, the body, movement, and touch in mutual synergy. Like when it’s impossible to stop looking at a catastrophe that terrifies us, to perceive its essential pain, truth, and beauty in a single whole, like when we look at it through our fingers and are constantly drawn in with greater force, suspecting and scared that something similar might slumber inside us, and we are utterly fascinated and paralyzed by what we see.

Masks, costumes, objects, installations, and performances often refer to nature, but also to culture, and they have no clear outlines – rather, they seem to grow, resisting a specific, unambiguous form, covering each other, jutting out, or climbing up. There is something shamanic about them. Jan literally mines the contents of the deepest recesses of his own being, dragging out into the light, through the mist, the harrowing images and attributes of diverse experiences, traumas, phobias, but also joy, love, and catharsis often on the edges of life and nothingness. There is something religious in him – at times, his stance, with outstretched arms, reminds us of a modern martyr who admits to both fear and courage.

The connection to nature and mysterious forests is apparent. The period of maturation comes to mind, during which time the artist’s key experiences included the naturist prose of Dobroslav Chrobák or František Švantner. Dynamism, eroticism, dark Liptov (a mountainous region in central Slovakia). The closest to this is the Horal series, which includes a large portion of the epic nature of the Tatra Mountains. Love for the body and corporeality, a certain theatrical or heroic nature, but not consumerist obsession or ironic distance or retro folk. States of life when we believe in other beings, attempts to confront unexpected thoughts that we are terrified of uttering out loud. He speaks openly and very honestly about his various psychological problems. Darkness, paralysis, or ecstasy are not motifs but indelible components of his personality – and not only his. Striking symptoms of our age are the various forms of depression, OCD, or bipolar disorder, all of which Jan openly discusses. This gives courage to others, whether the subject at hand is non-mainstream sexuality, mental health, or common human needs. The lyrics, work titles, and extracts of text sown into clothing speak to a need not to repress these states but to treat them instead, to be honest with oneself and accept oneself in any state.

Text: Zuzana Janečková

Image captions

1 | Jan Durina & Miriama Kardošová (Romeo & Hellion), Additional Feel, performance, 2021, Photo: Natália Zajačiková
2 | Jan Durina, Baby Ninja Thorax, photography, textile, 2020
3–4 | Jan Durina, Untitled, from series Horal, photography, 2017
5 | Jan Durina, Racing Thounghs, exhibition, Tabacka Gallery, Kosice, Slovakia, 2022, Photo: Tibor Czitó
6 | Jan Durina, Hasarsiz exhibition, Hayy Open Space, Izmir, Turkey, 2019, photo: İzem Yaşın

Zuzana Janečková

explores hybrid forms of art, new forms, eco-activism, collectorship, walking, the naming of artworks, and anonymous authorial tendencies, about which she wrote Slovník anonymity (Dictionary of Anonymity). She worked as a curator at Galerie TIC from 2012 to 2021 and is member of the editorial board of the Slovak version of the Artalk.cz magazin. She is a member of Café Utopia group. Since 2021 she has been working as a curator and project manager at the Peter Michal Bohúň Gallery in Liptov. She manages the new cultural and residential centre Dom Jana Hāla in Važec.

Jan Durina

(1988) is a young Slovak interdisciplinary visual artist who, through a wide range of media, creates a peculiar universe of beings, identities, and narratives that seem to originate from this world only as its distorted mirror echoes. His work is not strictly autobiographical, but questions of personal identity and sexuality, mental health, and the intimate aspects of his own experience are deeply embedded in it. His imagination, shaped by melancholy and the deprivation of someone who rejects a normalized, stereotyped world authentically and painfully, often leads him to explore corporeality and the human figure. And it becomes “quite evident which characters resonate with him and in which he playfully or ironically comments on overflowing testosterone-fueled egos.3” His artistic thinking is informed by critical concepts of queer, feminist, and ecofeminist theories, as well as Autotheory. At the heart of his work lies a common, overarching theme: mental health, human vulnerability, and care for others, alongside collaboration and the dynamics of non-hierarchical relationships. Human fragility has long ceased to be dogmatically suppressed as a weakness—art was among the first disciplines to recognize the need for its rehabilitation. Durina’s photographs, textiles, hand-embroidered and embellished objects, and drawings serve as mental maps of his body’s trajectories—collapsing, temporarily vague, refusing to fulfill expectations placed upon it, resisting through its wounds and fractures, and striving to love itself just as it is. In doing so, it becomes fully human.

#43 Collecting

This edition departs from our series of thematic issues, as it is a celebration of the magazine’s twentieth birthday. As is usually the case with birthday celebrations (particularly such important ones), memories of the past intersect with the future. This is why this issue is dedicated to our activities and a summary of them, along with talents we believe in. In place of allotting the second part of the magazine to theory and current news, as in other issues, we decided to create a special edition on a topic that we have been discussing for years – now, the time has finally come to open it, grasp it fully, and thus change the art market in the Czech Republic. The topic at hand is collecting.