Close Things / GABRIELA KISOVÁ

In one piece of wire

Gabriela Kisová talks about her beloved object and the many fascinations associated with it.

“When one says ‘close thing’, this is the very first object that comes to mind. I bought it around 2007 in Košice, where I come from. My friend Natália took me to an artistic blacksmith shop in Hrnčiarská Street back then. I was enchanted by that thing as soon as I saw it. It was made by an artistic blacksmith Jožko Kvietok.

I associate a lot of things I like with this bicycle, a lot of beautiful memories open up for me with this very object. And then there is the fascination with the object itself, the way it is made. I’m still exploring it, and I don’t actually know how the artist got this shape out of one piece of wire.

I’ve carried it everywhere all these years, it’s moved with me from apartment to apartment. Early on, I had the idea of not putting it on my shelf, but hanging it. And I love it – it’s so light it moves in the breeze. It always hangs in a special place in our house. When I walk by, I occasionally tap it and enjoy it. Our kids like it too, it attracts them like an object. Even my husband has a close relationship with it, though for a different reason than I do. He associates it with “Rychlé šípy” [The Rapid Arrows] by Jaroslav Foglar, a book he read as a child – there’s a story about a flying bicycle in it. It’s already a kind of our family talisman.

And then there’s another layer – cycling, which I love, and which this object embodies.
At the time I bought it, I had just returned from Germany, where I had spent six years. I lived and studied there, and I cycled every day. I was quite unhappy when I returned to Bratislava. In 2007 it was really impossible to cycle here, it was almost life-threatening. At least I didn’t dare, and I was going through withdrawal states, crying jags, I missed it so much. And then I started cycling, around 2011, when things got a bit better. I used to ride my bike to work, I used to carry our older son on it.

It’s a complete joy. Sitting on a bike is a bit like being on a throne and enjoying the world going by at speed. It always thrills me to see a woman on a bike, even more so if she’s dressed nicely, in high heels…or, even when I see men in suits going to work. So I not only enjoy cycling, but I enjoy watching it with enthusiasm.

For me, cycling is a form of freedom – and in that post-2007 period, my enjoyment of the subject made up for it, at least a little.

Then there are other memories, associations, associated with this object. In the 1990s, when Artforum opened in Košice on Mlynská Street, there was a bicycle that the artist Oleg Šuk made and gave it wings. Then it was also hung for some time in the Artforum in Bratislava. And now it is again in Košice on Hlavná Street in new premises. I used to go to the “afko” in Košice very often, it was my beloved bookstore. And Oleg Šuk was my teacher at elementary art school. He was a Buddhist, and probably thanks to this setting of his, the years spent at the art school under his tutelage were beautiful. When he died last year, I felt it as a great loss.

So when I see this bicycle of mine levitating, it also reminds me of the Artforum in my hometown. And then I think of my father’s old bicycle – a Steyr Waffenrad – an old men’s bicycle that he once bought as a young man, and it had been folded up in our garage for years.

Such different connotations are opened up to me by this little object. We love it. It’s such a simple thing and fascinating in that simplicity – to make an object out of one piece of wire that suddenly takes shape and space. It reminds me of drawing. And different mobiles, objects that move, that tinkle… And here I go from the bicycle to Calder’s works, or Jean Tinguely, whose work I like very much. One of the first readymades created by Marcel Duchamp was a bicycle wheel.

All of this makes up the emotional value of the subject for me. If someone told us to pack up and leave the apartment in two hours, I would definitely take it with me.”

Gabriela Kisová (1978), art theorist and curator. Originally from Košice, she studied sociology and art and media science at the University of Konstanz (Germany) and art education at the University of Prešov. From 2007 to 2009 she worked at the Kalligram publishing house and from 2008 to 2019 she was the director of the Krokus contemporary art gallery in Bratislava. She completed her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts with a dissertation on documentary films about visual artists of the second half of the 20th century. She regularly publishes on visual arts and has compiled several book titles on Slovak artists. She has taught at the Faculty of Arts of TUKE and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. She is a mother of two sons and lives with her family in Bratislava.
2 / 9 / 2021
by Katarína Poliačiková
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