Anita Brill on Ester Gašparová
The afterlife of symbols begins when their systems fall. Left behind with fragments of their past, the forms gradually absorb new meanings. Ester Gašparová translates these unstable narratives into permanent structures. In her sculptures and installations, she focuses on symbols, objects, and forms that haunt¹ the political or social systems that created them. Throughout her practice, she continuously returns to the infrastructures of power, focusing on three distinct territories: the remnants of socialism in public space in a post-socialist context, political symbolism, and protective gestures rooted in superstition and traditional rituals in Eastern Europe. These recognizable elements become open to entirely new modes of perception once they are removed from their original settings and deliberately placed into new material relationships. Rather than treating history as a finished memoir, Gašparová approaches it as a living layer. Isolating specific, niche narratives, she translates the ways the past is remembered, forgotten, or stylized for political use.
Ostnáč. 2022. ceramic dog collar.
Although fieldwork and archival research are essential to her process, casting and repetition remain the defining methods of production in her practice. Through the repetitive modification of forms, Gašparová visualizes invisible, quiet structures operating in the background. Her production demands immense physical labor, where the boundary between the artist’s mind and the material dissolves, until she becomes an invisible extension of the work itself. This method moves past merely illustrating ethnographic sources, leaving the audience with quiet, unsettling artifacts that feel simultaneously familiar and deeply obscure. This strategy comes to the forefront in the work I Was the Source of Discord, the Owner of Dissonance (2024). Here, a monumental concrete and steel construction grows out of her interest in socialist public art and the discrepancy of its perception in Eastern and Western Europe. In Gašparová’s view, public art from the socialist era in Czechoslovakia frequently loses its original context, entering contemporary spaces stripped of its political weight. Valued mostly for a superficial fetishization of brutalist aesthetics, these artworks leave their actual histories pushed out of view. She responds to this amnesia by repetitively casting 3,700 mosaic tiles in concrete and displaying them on a structure that resembles a commercial billboard, where an unsettling drone soundpiece intensifies the multisensory atmosphere in the space. This allows the structure to be perceived as an active, tactile barrier. The audience walks around the installation, looking at the image from various perspectives to form a direct, physical relationship with it, until the architecture of the mosaic wall grows into a freestanding threshold whose ideological details are left open to interpretation.
