Interviews with the Monster – Eva Kot’átková

A site-specific adaptation of Czech artist Eva Kot’átková’s Interviews with the Monster (2021) is on display in the North Gallery on the ground floor of Sapieha Palace. Kot’átková’s work examines the individual’s relationship with social and institutional structures, exploring the rules and constraints that shape how we think, learn, move, and create. At the heart of the installation, visitors are transported to the construction site of a sheltered housing project intended for underserved people – one that was planned but never completed. Voices from various perspectives echo through the space, recounting real-life stories widely reported in the media in the artist’s home country. The piece investigates mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion, the rigid grip of normativity, and the unreasonable, inert fears that arise when faced with something perceived as different or unintelligible. Here, the monster is not the ‘other’ but the embodiment of learned anxieties and irrational fears.

Eva Kot’átková: ‘Let us meet the monster. It doesn’t have multiple eyes or legs, scales or claws, or a  menacing mouth spewing fire. The monster is here with us quietly, without any extravagance. It gets into bed with us, slipping into our dreams. It waits for us early in the morning, making sure we do not leave home without it. It forms sentences with us, formulates opinions, directs our gaze, evaluates, labels, and measures. It seeps into our deepest dreams, desires, and feelings – into everything that shapes our relationships and experience of the world. It doesn’t want us to forget that we live in a world that is not for all. A world built on binary logic of healthy and ill, normal and different, functional and unfitting or useless. It creates pressure to conform and to exclude others. It teaches us to fear the unknown and to distrust anything that differs. A distinctive movement, gesture, or sound is immediately diagnosed, corrected, treated. If we wanted to leave it behind, to escape its influence even for a brief moment, we would have to look at the patterns on which our society stands and destabilise the ground beneath our own feet. We would have to acknowledge how much pain, discrimination, and suffering our wellbeing is built upon. We would have to take responsibility as active participants in this world’s multi-body. To begin, we could practice some dreaming. Let us dream a little of a world where the monster does not rule.’

Complementing the installation is a newly created spatial collage made from cut-outs of various educational books. As in the main installation, Kot’átková explores the forces that constrain and discipline bodies. Yet in this surreal assemblage, fragmented and vulnerable figures come together as a collective body – one that defies categorisation into binaries such as weak vs. strong or sentient vs. non-sentient.

The exhibition is accompanied by an educational programme designed for both individual visitors and school groups. Educational activities, guided tours, and textile workshops provide a space to discuss and explore fear, shifts in language, collective and personal experiences, and the place of difference in society. For more details, please visit the Sapieha Palace website.

Eva Kot’átková (1982, Prague) holds a Master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and a PhD from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She is the co-founder of the Institute of Anxiety, a platform for collaboration between artists, theorists and activists, which views anxiety as a product of social, political, economic and ecological forces. The Institute of Anxiety advocates for structural change, system critique, and collective acts of sharing as paths towards positive transformation.

Her work has been the focus of solo exhibitions held at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) with the installation The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, curated by Hana Janečková; Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2023); National Gallery Prague (2022–23); Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2019); Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2018); MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, MA (2015); Modern Art Oxford, UK (2013) among others. Kot’átková participated in documenta, Kassel (2022); the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019), JIWA: the Jakarta Biennial (2017), Sonsbeek16, Arnheim, the Netherlands (2016); the New Museum’s Triennial, New York (2015), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), the 18th Sydney Biennial (2012), and the 11th Biennale de Lyon (2011).