Galleri CC, Båstadsgatan 4, Malmö, Sweden
25. 4 - 25. 5. 2025
Artists: Veronika Čechmánková (CZ), Darja Lukjanenko (UA), Laze Tripkov (MK) a Sofie Tobiášová (CZ)
Curators: Viktor Čech a Lenka Sýkorová (CZ)
The international exhibition Zora’s Twilight was produced with Galleri CC with collaboration Altán Klamovka Gallery, and supported by Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem a Malmö Stad and the Kulturrådet.
The moment of dusk arrives, our daily worries recede with the sun of day and are replaced by the dim twilight of our dreams and desires. Zora of twilight, or also in Czech Večernice, was in Old Slavic mythology the personification of twilight, the departure of the sun beyond the horizon. But perhaps she was also the one who, with her merciful darkness, covered the evils and cruelties of the world and established a reign of intimate darkness and rest.
Most of us are probably aware that in the cruel storms of the contemporary world, any meaningful art cannot be a mere escape into the dark platonic cave of our projected desires. Even so, that suggestive sensuous power of moments connected with moments of emergence and dissolution, dawn and dusk, as once fascinated the Romantic visionaries, is something that can give us strength and teach us the way to new and better ways.
The symbolic perception of the world around us, as was customary with our ancestors, can be as much the consolation of our souls today as its damnation. It does not matter whether we claim to be daughters or sons of light or darkness, but rather how we can find our way to the right signifier in the signified. But we should not fall into the terrifying black light of the traps and falsehoods of the Dark Enlightenment, which seeks behind the tradition of the past and its faded shadows a dangerous instrument of power, but instead we should look to the historical memory of symbolism and imagination as possible inspirations for deepening current social empathy and sharing.
In the days before the advent of electric lighting and the ubiquitous invasion of evening illumination into all corners, banishing every ghost or obscurity, 'dusking' was a common practice in many countries and households. The quiet passive watching of the fading of light and colour, coupled with the plunging of the surrounding environment into ever darker shadows, was a kind of quiet meditation on a very slow process composed ofnmany fragments of timelessness. Where the day was defined by a sharp gaze, spatial relationships and the clear position of human bodies and surrounding objects within its fixed boundaries, a twilight gradually set in in which the understanding of place and object relations became increasingly indeterminate and open to our imagination. The twilight-watching family intimately shared the uniqueness of their unity. The lonely viewernthen lost the anxiety and fear of the solitary figure and became an overlap between himself and the surrounding environment or nature. As in the work of the artists in this exhibition, human experience has become primarily a space between us, in which loneliness and the understanding of darkness as loss and negation are replaced by sharing and a sense of unity.
