For her exhibition subtitled 'ERROR', Eva Kotátková focuses on relationships between human bodies and the oppressive institutional structures that sometimes surround them, in a new video and series of collages and sculptures. Kotátková is interested in the stories or cases of individuals who—for various reasons—are unable to integrate themselves into social structures. They become secluded, isolated, and handicapped by their circumstances, or develop alternative means to communicate, often through objects, props, and devices. Others build parallel identities to escape from reality into a constructed world. In such a world, people become subordinate to their own invented rules, and apply different communication patterns and new hierarchies to their everyday life.
The exhibition includes a group of sculptural assemblages and collages that reference outmoded medical equipment, surreal body extensions, body parts, props, and apparatuses. Also on view will be a video work filmed on the grounds of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, titled ‚The Judicial Murder of Jakob Mohr'. The video shows a staged trial performed in the hospital's theater, involving professional actors, staff, and patients. The genesis of this performance is a 1909–10 drawing made by psychiatric patient Jakob Mohr in which he depicted himself as a defendant on trial, suspecting the impartial court audience to be masked doctors or fellow patients who conspired to betray him. Mohr called his drawings proofs or documents that testified to the existence of a so-called "influencing machine", a device that influenced his everyday actions and intercepted his most private thoughts.
