Michaela Knizova - At the End of Time
 At the End of Time |  At the End of Time |
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Opening Exhibition:
17 March 2015
18:30 - 21:30
19:30 Avant-prèmiere of Sova Stroj Project by Michel Flammant (experimental electronic music)
20:30 Contemporary dance performance by Luna Cenere
On Michaela Knizova:
Born in 1982, Michaela grown up in Slovakia where she finished her art studies in New Media in summer 2014. Michala currently lives and works in Luxembourg .
Knizova works primarily with photography and post-photography, while sometimes also engaging with video and performance art. Her photographic pictures are composed like paintings and the cameras represent the means for the artist to perpetuate her mental compositions. Impressions and expressions are the most important factors.
While investigating the possibilities offered by photography, Knizova has been influenced since the beginning of her work by painting and photography of the Victorian Era as well as the symbolism and the expressionism from the turn of the last century. She is fascinated by the victorian portrayal of morbid beauty, the obsession with death. Another important influence was the iconography of saints from the Middle Ages to Barocco.
The majority of the artist’s series are self-portraits. This choice also explains Knizova’s priviledge of rather feminine themes like classical fairy tale heroines, fairies, folklore figures or female saints. She likes to oscillate between extremes – Michaela started with self stylization as a saint and went through interpretations of Snowhite or personas from slovak folk myths. After some time of working with self-portraits she decided to cooperate with other people. The result was the series Time To Forget The Colour Of My Eyes (2013) during her art residency in Kharkov, Ukraine. The photographs of this series create fictional stories of women, depict moments of their lives and document the traces they leave on the interiors of the city. The project Time To Forget The Colour Of My Eyes is kind of romantic and sentimental, like some people’s memories. It is also mysterious, melancholic and gloomy as if, at certain moments, it connects life with death and the present with the past.
Michaela Knizova’s way of working is very intuitive. She constantly looks for inspiring places, for places with some kind of history and for places that evoke some more or less precise association. She inserts herself into these settings with only my body or with requisites, she explores her first association and let herself be guided by the place, the circumstances and intuition.
At this moment Knizova is working on her open ended series Winds Are Landing At The End Of Time (2014) in which she creates the poetic post-apocalyptic atmosphere of a world where only one man and one woman are left, a reversed Adam and Eve so to say.
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More on Michaela:
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