Painting & Printmaking School of Fine Art
Jasmína Lustigová
The stairs creaked. Tree figures entered the dining room, each through a different door. The lilac season has begun. The breakfast table will become a battlefield for a few days.
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￣￣￣￣┗┓The first morning sounds are like my immediate emotional responses to mundane realities. They creep into my mind uncontrollably. To get to my studio and develop this sensibility, I have to choose as who and through what I enter.
[diary entry April 2024]
Jasmína Lustigová is an artist shifting between drawing, painting, art writing, object making, and filmmaking. A four-year study of architecture serves as a foundation of her creative process. She freely translates research and diagrams into personal narratives and imagery. Whether it is a film from the perspective of a shopping mall floor (Arcada, 2023) or an upscaled drawing of a toothbrush, the author uncovers the semiotic systems behind the ordinary. With humor, she explores the empty spaces between meanings – the places of fantasy-making, alteration, and forgetting. Jasmína’s work allows us to travel out of ourselves and come back, it somehow functions as a swing.
Arcada
The main character of the short film Arkada is the floor of the shopping center Nový Smíchov (Prague), one of the first malls built after the Velvet Revolution (1989) in the Czech Republic. The part-live action, part-animated video illustrates the moments that took placein the mall. However, they are presented as memories that the floor discusses during psychotherapy. Using the personification of the floor of a department store, the authors create a character that physically perceives the inhumanity with which its founders and visitors treat the building. The viewer is led humorously, but very precisely, to empathic compassion with this symbol of capitalism in Bohemia.
The project was created in a collaboration with Sofie Gjuričová.
