Sarah Dubná: I'm Sick of Fucking and Not Knowing How to Rage
1. 3. – 24. 3. 2024
opening: 29. 2. 2024 from 6 PM
curator: Zuzana Jakalová
Anger and aggression are feelings that we generally perceive rather negatively, as they can lead to hurt, pain and destruction. But anger is much more than just a precursor to violence; it is also a source of valuable information about ourselves and the world around us. What we can learn from anger might have not been otherwise discovered. Anger occurs when something feels wrong, when we´re in pain, when we don't want to or can't agree with something. It is an dynamic mobilizing force that breaks us out of lethargy and passivity, energizes us, inspires us to change. Jack Halberstam claims, that "anger is a political space," and as such it can be inhabited not only individually but collectively. When we inhabit rage as a political space, it becomes an active social tool that allows us to expose inequalities, forces us to collectively resist injustice, fight for new kinds of imagination or for a more dignified life for all. However, righteous anger is also complicated to express due to the social disproportion between those who are supposedly allowed to be angry and those who are expected not to be, and whose anger is often downplayed and suppressed.
Sarah Dubná deals with aggression and anger in both her painting and her tattoo practice. For her paintings, she uses a variety of materials; canvas, found and used textiles, stucco, plaster and walls, all of which she - sometimes subtly, sometimes aggressively - alters with anger and vigour. She stabs, scrapes, perforates, claws, tears them apart and then reassembles, staples, calms, gives it a new inner order, and thus maintains the tension between anger and reconciliation, agitation and calmness, pain and pleasure. Across her work, she thus suggests ways in which anger in its complexity can be reappropriated, and how through this reappropriation we can return to ourselves as human beings and as political subjects.
In her work, painter Sarah Dubná (1993) combines experiences gained through art, beekeeping and tattooing. She explores the surface and depth of materials - whether it be paper, wall, found canvas or human skin - through techniques of pricking, scraping and perforating, testing the boundary between their destructive and healing powers. Sarah Dubná studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. She has exhibited both solo (Sift Through Stains, 2021, XY, Olomouc, Pedestrian Escape, 2019, City Surfer, Prague, etc.) and in group exhibitions (Nuance, 2023, Hermetika Gallery, Berlin, Only Transitions and Translations, 2023, Meetfactory, Prague, Imagine a Garden, 2022, Entrance, Prague, etc.). She has also contributed to publications dedicated to tattooing outside salons (PokePokePoke 2, 2020; PokePokePoke 3, 2022). She lives and works in Prague.
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7,
GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Media partners: ArtMap, artalk.cz and jlbjlt.net
