ONDŘEJ MERTA

Build a fire that’s just right — not too big, not too small

Painting Studio 2

Your work draws on personal and family experiences, yet it also raises broader questions about representation. Does indirectness provide you a way to maintain your own perspective while avoiding the idea that it is a statement on behalf of an entire community?
For me, indirectness leaves room for ambivalence, doubt, as well as a personal dimension. I do not have to translate everything into an unambiguous statement or stance. At the same time, I feel that some things can be formulated more precisely with a metaphor, a situation or a material, rather than taking a direct approach. I never try to create an image of collective experience. That is not even possible.

You have been working along with your mother for a long time. Has this collaboration evolved over time from a working method into something more fundamental to your very thinking about your work? If so, in what way? 
It was never just a working method. I initially saw this collaboration as an opportunity to create a shared space within which we could create a specific work. However, I gradually realized that the very process of this collaboration is perhaps more important than the resulting work.
I would say that for my mother, it was always mainly about spending time together. The resulting works have actually been secondary to that. And I feel the same way.
Conversations and the revisiting of various situations started to function as a way to reflect on the transmission of experience in general – not just what is being passed on, but especially the conditions under which such transmission can take place.

How important do you consider the origins and previous lives of the objects you use in your installations? Do you perceive your work as readymades, or rather as situated work with objects?
A certain coherence is important to me – the feeling that everything somehow fits together, even on levels that are not immediately apparent. Information about the origin of the objects and materials or their previous life is not so important to me, but I rather reflect that they carry a certain experience or relationship to other parts of the work. I often feel that the installation functions more as a structure of relationships than as a collection of individual things.

photo: Polina Davydenko