Silvia Binda

The exhibition at ATELIER XIII is based on a doctoral thesis of the artist Silvia Binda Heiserová, which she is finishing at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. In her work, she focuses on research and analysis of the phallocentric power concept as a symbol of masculine strength in the urban environment. From a feminist perspective, she focuses her attention on architectural landmarks that serve as a powerful tool of ideology and might in the context of history.

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Silvia Binda Heiserová’s artistic work follows a research of historical patriarchal elements in urban architecture. She adopts these aspects of architectural elements and consequently reinterprets them with her own aesthetics from the position of gender (in)equality. With her approach, she subverts the original seriousness and ideological meaning of obelisks, monuments and memorials serving as tools to spread various ideologies.

Binda Heiserová expresses herself through abstract painting with geometrically clear lines based on a thoroughly planned template. She opts for plain colours, symmetry and vertical elements of puristic architecture. She abstracts and extracts the original hidden codes from the context to create her own metaphorical building system. She points out biased reading and interpretation of history and urban space as a political arena.

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The author expands the medium of painting with vertical wooden sculpture and objects. She adds pink colour to industrial prefabricated paving blocks as an ironic cliché of the feminine principle. The Modulor Discordant exhibition is referring to the androcentric approach of the architect Le Corbusier, who materialized his ideas in the Modulor concept. It is a stylized male figure which should represent the ideal harmonic proportions. With her approach of a sophisticated feminist anarchy, Binda Heiserová disrupts ideological seriousness and dominance of the male perspective.

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Curatorial text by Martina Ivičič