Jana Sterbak, born in Prague in 1955, is one of the most influential artists on the current international artistic scene. The dual Czech-Canadian background of this artist can be seen in her interest in historical-social subjects, treated with the liberating critical spirit typical of her country of origin, balanced against the direct, concise and reducing manner of dealing with these themes, which derives from her subsequent training in Canada.

Her work is characterised by the creation of shocking images that examine the question of the privacy of human beings, the personal combination of political, biological, mythological and personal aspects that have transformed her oeuvre into one of the most poetic and radical anthropological observations of recent years.

The exhibition From performance to video presented by ARTIUM of Alava, explores the two poles of her artistic production, in order to relate her first performances (that led her to delve into the interesting world of biotechnology) to her most significant work of recent years, including complex video installations that revolve around the idea of the look of the other.

This is the first exhibition that brings together two large installations produced by Jana Sterbak during the first decade of the 21st century. They are works with multiple screens that represent major incursions into the world of experimental cinematography. The work From Here To There was made with a puppy fitted with a miniature video camera that films the animal's wanderings around a snowy field in Canada, stimulated by everything it comes across. With this work, the artist represented Canada in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003. Waiting For High Water was shot in Venice, during a characteristic period of high water levels in the city. In this piece, the filming method has become more complex and three “eye-cameras” are used in order to capture panoramic images at water level. This videoinstallation has been produced by ARTIUM of Alava and was first shown at the Prague International Biennial in 2005.

In intimate dialogue with these recent works, the exhibition recalls the main performances of this artist. In the Eighties, she used exacerbating fleshiness and electrification to propose intriguing metaphors on the dangers and restraints that an individual must overcome in order to build his or her identity. The exhibition includes the pioneering work Remote Control II (1989), which was selected for the Aperto of the 1991 Venice biennial (which brought her work to the attention of the European artistic community for the first time). In this work, the artist discovers how technological advances have allowed us to surpass the confines of our corporeality. Hence the idea of non-functional garments and accessories for the body such as Uniform (1991) and Sisyphus Sport (1997).

Through insignificant actions relating to the physical and animal world, the artist often describes absurd situations capable of evoking a radical modification of the meaning of what we see and in this way, relativizes major events in the development of the human race. Thus, in Artist as Combustible (1986) her image as artist is consumed by fire, in Absorption: Work in progress (1995) the artist herself is transformed into a moth that devours the suits of the famous German artist Joseph Beuys, or in Psi a Slecna (Defence) (1995) the howling of a dog completely distorts the solemnity of a singing session. Recently, she has transferred the performance capacity of human beings to objects, shown by disturbing mutations in works such as Bread Bed (1997), Selection (for Sisyphe) (1998) and Dissolution II (Auditorium) (2001). In the last of these, a group of chairs partly built with ice is destroyed as the ice melts, with tragicomic results. With the use of unexpected images, the sculptures and actions of Jana Sterbak evoke suggestive metaphors of the human condition.

Teresa Blanch
Comisaria de la exposición