Anna Hulačová
Eating Planet

The subject of the latest sculptural work by Anna Hulačová (b. 1984), created for the exhibition at the Brno House of Arts, is agriculture, or rather its current state, contributing largely to a deepening of the ecological and environmental crises and its impact on our planet. The title of the exhibition Eating Planet critically refers to the aspects of modern agriculture targeting a significant increase in production and consumption leading to depletion and extensive devastation of the soil and the environment and disturbing the natural relationship to land and food.

The installation of freely composed figurative concrete sculptures is approached by Anna Hulačová as a special kind of symbiosis or a hybrid integration of man and machine (specifically agricultural or technological devices). The stylised human figures devoid of individualised features resemble mechanised automatons interconnected with the machines they operate. Formally they refer to the interwar sculptural social civilism where the theme of the union of man and technology was perceived as a positive utopian gesture; references to modernist abstraction are also evident, primarily in surfaces with linear drawing creating a contrast to the full sculptural form. We can also find references to socialist realism with its subjects of labour and a unified collectivised society. The layering and combining of these equivocal motifs from the past leads us down the trail of the relationship between man and technology, which regardless of the utopian vision has become a tool for the devastation of nature. All of these aspects, which in today‘s world take the form of centralisation, close links with the latest technologies, genetic engineering and replacement of humans by robots in the near future, take a course leading rather to a dystopian scenario, but above all show the cycle of production and consumption against the backdrop of a wider context and historical background.

photo: Polina Davydenko