video sculpture, 8-second loop, OSB boards, elastic cord with hooks
purchased 2018 with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture
This video sculpture represents another aspect of Pavla Sceranková’s work – kinetic motion, transience, and sculptural construction. The moving object Up!, formally depicting the stepped platform on which prize-winners or medal-winners stand, originated as an institutional criticism of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. The gesture of destruction – or aligning all the steps on the same level – expresses the artist’s criticism of attempts to categorize one “artistic performance” ahead of or behind another. Up! is one of Sceranková’s puzzle-like sculptures, based on a repetitive rhythm comprising the disappearance and reappearance of a solid structure. This oscillation between destruction and construction can be read on a broader level as a comment on existential transience in the context of the material world, as well as an allusion to the rhythm of human life, in which we constantly oscillate between stable and unstable positions, the collapse of worldly constructs and the discovery of new perspectives.