Radka Bodzewicz - Faust / DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Radka Bodzewicz has long drawn inspiration from literary sources – from poetry, prose, and even scholarly or philosophical texts. With her distinctive visual language, she updates the timeless subjects and themes that she finds in literature, rendering them in extensive, conceptually and expressively cohesive series in which she often combines classical artistic techniques with elements of new technologies.

In recent years the artist has applied this method to canonical works of world literature: Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, the epic poem Paradise Lost by the English poet John Milton, and the essay The Myth of the Eternal Return by the American religious scholar Mircea Eliade. For the exhibition at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art she has decided to continue this artistic reflection with another iconic literary work – Goethe’s Faust.

Bodzewicz interprets the story of Doctor Faust as an expression of the Jungian archetypes of human desire, which originate in deeply ingrained patterns of experience and are – to put it in (simplified) literary terms – the motivation, driving force, and architect of human destinies. Thus, in the universal conflict between good and evil, Faust, as portrayed by Radka Bodzewicz, is the embodiment of our own stories about the endless craving for knowledge, love, power, and fame and our desire to transcend the boundaries of what is possible – tales of the fatefulness and irreversibility of our own decisions, our own pacts with the devil.

Curator: Michaela Šilpochová