Photos by Anna Ignatovich

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AFTERBIRTH

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curated by Anna Ignatovich

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Karo Kuchar’s exhibition Afterbirth at Vienna Collectors Club unfolds as both a biological metaphor and a conceptual continuation of artist’s engagement with the notion of time. The unique spatial characteristics of Vienna Collectors Club underline the intimate character of the exhibition. Contrast to the formal frame of the white cube gallery, the former apartment-turned-art-space creates another level of narrative - its domestic architecture highlights the tender state of motherhood and resonates with the soft and familiar materiality of Kuchar’s artworks.
As a sequel to her exhibition I Wish I Had a Time Machine, Kuchar comes back to the idea of time not as a linear chronology, but as a spacial concept: a continuous, enclosing environment in which we are constantly in motion, and carries on with her dream of time travelling. But this title also gains a second intimate layer - Kuchar reflects on that existential “after” within the artist’s life and practice after becoming a mother. Because particularly after birth the relation to time radically changes. As Julia Kristeva states in Women’s Time, female temporality resists linear progression, unfolding instead through cyclical and subjective rhythms. Motherhood radically reorganizes time, placing the female body into a different temporal economy altogether - one that cannot be fully translated into dominant, linear narratives. Thus the exhibition explores how motherhood reshapes the experience of time, disrupting the patriarchal ideas of productivity, progress, and artistic authorship.

​At the same time, Kuchar’s work resonates with Hélène Cixous’ appeal in The Laugh of the Medusa to reclaim the female body as a site of knowledge, writing, and transformation. The body in Afterbirth is not represented directly, yet it is present everywhere: in softness, in fabric, in touch, in the hollowed spaces of the shoe sculptures. A mirror-like textile work made of padded organza replaces the bodily reflection with the embroidered word “afterbirth” as to make the emphasis on the conceptual rather than literate.

The recurring image of loafers - presented both on a shoe rack and within a cage-like structure - introduces another layer of tension. For Kuchar, the loafer is a unisex, practical shoe, adopted by both women and men, and through this symbol she addresses everyone in the audience: as if any of us could slide into the empty shoes she leaves behind and step into the dream of time travelling.

Inside the cage, the shoes appear with delicate organza wings with fragments of wall surfaces on them, turning them into a fragile, dreamlike time machine - one that is at once capable of flight and simultaneously trapped. The use of soft, cloudy materials like organza creates a dream-like atmosphere throughout the exhibition, where Kuchar imagines that we may have already disappeared inside her mirror with only the shoes remained. Thus the winged loafers become quiet signs of absence, movement, and a presence that is no longer visible.

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