Katerina Seda @Renaissance Society, Hit Links for Essay & Video Lecture

Czech artist Kateřina Šedá’s primary media are her friends, family, and community of her native town Líšeň. Šedá (b. 1977) uses performance, staged activities, and public interventions to reactivate social concourse as it is the basis for a sense of self predicated on group identification. The Society presented It Doesn’t Matter, a series of over 600 drawings executed by Šedá’s 77-year-old grandmother, cataloging in size and type the various tools and supplies sold through the Brno hardware shop her grandmother managed for over thirty years under communism. While therapeutic in intent, the result is a profound reflection on memory and subjectivity as expressed through, rather than in spite of, alienation.