Milena Dopitová is one of the key personalities of contemporary Czech visual art and her work resonates strongly in the local and international contexts. It is unique due to its capacity to convincingly express the complex aporias of today’s world in a very concise form, combining conceptual foundations with handicraft and a strong, yet non-pathetic ethos with a sense of artistic detail.

Milena Dopitová’s multimedia project for the House of Arts Brno is monumental, but not opulent. The exhibition reflects on the sustainability of cultural, national and ethnic identities, whose impact on Western civilization has been extremely intense. It paraphrases and blends the vocabularies of Christian, Judaic and Arabic traditions – i.e., the cultures that for centuries have most significantly shaped the European “West” (in the sense of the Occident, not the post-war order) – while employing elements that evoke the ordinariness, and to some extent the superficiality, of contemporary life. Dopitová displays an impressive, almost theatrically staged associative “narrative” about the power of human memory, about overcoming the duality of the body and mind and, last but not least, about the instability of the present world.

House of Arts Brno