Michaela Šuranská, absorbed in artifacts and landscapes, materializes in her works visual situations of a specific gardening allotment near Levice, where she grew up. However, she does not create real landscape records. She works with the disruption of chronological, logical, and ideological contexts of the place, overlapping them, deconstructing and reconstructing them anew, “montaging” them. She draws on the idea that even a gardening allotment can be regarded as an atypical type of open-air archaeological museum.

 

A multilayered space that is, in itself, a postmodern collage, a hybrid, where individual elements evoke the history of the locality, present subjective micro-histories, or refer solely to themselves. The exhibition Líščie diery (Fox Holes) is inspired by the fact that on the territory of the chosen gardening allotment lies an original hillfort from the 9th–10th century. It is partially destroyed and overlaid by careless modern layers resulting from the activities of gardeners and winemakers in the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

The title Fox Holes also refers to the nature of the present terrain, in which there are various pits, cavities left by uprooted trees, ditches, and the edges of the original hillfort sloping down to the Hron River. In this area, a peculiar landscape of abysses has emerged, filled with various discarded natural as well as artificial materials. The artist integrates these found “artifacts” directly into her works or creates new simulated references to the landscape area of the “fox holes.”

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The records of the “holes” are overlaid with another type of ruins, namely “antiquizing” ruins of buildings and temples, thereby connecting the high, historical with the semantically lower and contemporary. In her paintings, multiple overlapping layers of various motifs and realities are thus visualized—gardening allotments, ancient architecture from present-day Italy, vineyards, forests, stones, and various temporal traces and periods.

 

The artist works with a film of memories, of diverse images that are absorbed and then retrieved from memory into compositions—sometimes more concrete, sometimes only suggested, and elsewhere entirely deconstructed. The play with forms and the breaking of painting outward into space is reinforced in Šuranská’s work by the integration of found waste material, which seems to complete the story of her works.

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The paintings and environment-expanding canvases in the exhibition are complemented by two videos documenting something like the artist’s symbolic initial archaeological research—mapping the environment and collecting discarded natural as well as synthetic materials that she later uses in her paintings and installations. One of the videos includes an audio track in which Šuranská names the collected elements in her own words, according to their shape and texture—“cut off, torn out, informational, flax-like, scaly,” etc. By doing so, she attaches a certain seriousness to these fragments, as they will likely become what future generations discover after us.

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In the “fox holes,” Michaela Šuranská creates new types of environments that may be real, partially real, or not real at all. What happens in these environments may have already taken place, may be taking place, or may only occur in the future, with only a record left behind. It all depends on the vantage point from which the situation is observed. Šuranská’s paintings are based on reality, photographs, collages, diverse motifs, her own industrial and landscape iconography, but also on added materials in the form of textiles and tarpaulins inserted directly into the canvases.

 

These are motifs that protrude outward toward the viewer, while simultaneously pulling them back into the surface of the painting. Through her intervention into the Flatgallery space, the artist refers to human rituals and sacred places, which, following Foucault’s essay, she describes as “heterotopias.” She defines these territories/slices as types of places—“non-places,” other, marginal, strange, mysterious, even cult-like spaces that can be found in every era, culture, and civilization. In her case, it is a specific “heterotopia” in the form of the original Hallstatt hillfort near Tlmače, on which, from around the 1970s, a gardening allotment was established.

 

This place has become a kind of peculiar preserved territory, where ancient history overlaps with the not-so-distant past and the present. It is a prototype of a place in which the historical and the contemporary, as well as the real and the fictional, break into each other and intertwine. It is a hybrid in real space and time, one that is open to diverse interpretations and perspectives.