works / White Disease

The installation is part of the exhibition Bolest těch druhých / The Pain of Others DOX Contemporary Art Centre, Prague, December 2022 to April 2023

Curators: Leoš Válka, Otto M. Urban, Michaela Šilpochová, Tomáš Glanc and Stefano Carini

Exhibiting artists: Hans Peter Alvermann, Ali Arkady, Christian Boltanski, Dario Bosio, Wilhelm Brasse, Sergey Bratkov, Jacques Callot, Robert Capa, Stefano Carini, Maurizio Cattelan, Dagmar Demming, Otto Dix, Roger Fenton, Abel Gance, Francisco Goya, Stanley Greene, Gottfried Helnwein, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Bohuš Kubinský, Sasha Kurmaz, Kateryna Lysovenko, František Novák, Marsel Onysko, Claus Otto Paeffgen, Party Of The Dead, Gerhard Richter, Andres Serrano, Tim Shaw, David Shrigley, Chaim Sokol, Bohdan Sokur, Lena Stroganova & Alina Dykhman, Alexander Tinei, Rosemarie Trockel, Nick Ut, Matvei Vaisberg, Jitka Válová, Alina Yakubenko, Yōsuke Yamahata and Kamila Ženatá

„Hey, it was a doctor! (He breaks the medicine bottles and stomps on them.) There! Long live the war! Long live the marshal!“

Karel Čapek, The White Disease

The theme of Karel Čapek’s famous play is still highly topical today. Kamila Ženatá has created an installation of the same name – a scrum of absurd white hell somewhere in a shelter, underground or waste room. The bodies of dummies covered with a horrifying number of rash-like growths, disoriented figures in a world where things are not what they seem to be and false reality is experienced as truth. Viruses that creep into an object’s identity and occupy its inner world like a metabolized aggressor. The disease is highly contagious…

(technical assistance Milan Ohnisko, Matěj Bečička, Ondřej Bečička)