.: Sophie Dvořák :.

(...) Dvořáks flächige und z.T. auch symbolisch aufgeladenen Digitaldrucke erinnern an grafische Darstellungen, die aus Medien, vor allem aus Nachrichtensendungen vertraut sind. Bildtitel wie „Unsichere Grenzen“ oder „Erdrutsch“ bestätigen diese Assoziationen, die bei längerer Betrachtung jedoch nicht wirklich eingelöst werden. Vielmehr verweisen die real kaum oder gar nicht bestimmbaren Orte auf die Erkenntnis eines wohl doch fiktionalen Moments. Dementsprechend verzichtet Sophie Dvořák konsequent auf schriftliche Zusätze, legt es nahe, die Sehgewohnheiten der Medienberichterstattung und damit auch eine zweifelsohne vorhandene Abstumpfung gegenüber Kriegsberichten zu reflektieren (...)
(Stefan Gronert)

Sophie Dvořák: The World as Medial Cartography in Radical Change

Sophie Dvořák employs an abstracted, reduced and decontextualized language of form in her cartographic image boards. She carries out, in her boards produced in series a conceptual analysis of how picture and language in these convey information from the printed media.
Dvořák uses maps and mappings pictured in daily papers and magazines for quick accessibility, of local and global processes as a starting point. She operates between revealing and hiding medial-political power structures, their technical means for representation, and the opposing appropriations of didactic models. As spatial artifact, the map becomes the conveyor of an event-space. Apart from this, the images of supplementary texts like, ”landslide”, or “troops make only slow progress”, or, “path of devastation” are dismantled from their pictorial context and added as titles. The forced process of abstraction within the picture through this has not just the effect of causing a withdrawal of information but also brings one’s attention to how news reports in the media help themselves to cartographic sign systems in the accelerated circulation of global worlds of pictures, and in their competition for affect-driven economies that can be manipulated. The interrelation of cartography and territory growing out of the precision of the picture of deception was already presented as an argument by Jean Baudrillard, opposite its underlying simulation effects.
The space, ordered cartographically, loses a geopolitical way to be ordered, through the emptying out of information in the image boards of Dvořák. Visual and indexical pressures become leveled through the monochrome green, blue or brown treatment of the pictorial surfaces. Dvorák follows Ludwig Wittgenstein’s interpretation here, of the map as picture. She continues, through empty speech balloons, to let one fill these individually. In opposition to the often-appealed-to cartographic rationality, allusions turn into pictograms like those found in comics. Artists who act as cartographers carry out a new division of the world. Sophie Dvořák works differently. She turns our awareness toward the politically-oriented content of the media in ways of mapping, and carries out, in this respect, a kind of “cultural mapping”. How well the map functions as a projection area in our media-based culture is shown in that, after all the information has been emptied out of it, attempts at interpretation get started immediately, and the viewer tries to figure out where the reproduced region of landscape is to be found. At the same time, one’s glance, in picking out motives on the map, goes on a trip. Particularly the artistic vocabulary of maps functions allegorically in this way, tautologically, as well as being entropic and virtual. This kind of dealing with different ways of seeing events or things, with perspectives and projections, with assumed knowledge or lack of it in the viewer, explicitly makes its subject the gaps between our perception of the visual media, and our ability to acquire knowledge based on its offerings, that we are constantly confronted with. The subject here is how much formation and information is spanned by formulas and formats. With this modified concept of form the acquisition of knowledge is discernible through the picture as an effect of its performative structures. Artistic dealings with mapping do not only constitute aesthetic change or transformation, but also a real and utopian attempt to engage in a new cultural mapping involving the politics of the media. Just as the political value of the formal pushes through in this confrontation with the printing media, and the question of whether formal time and space constructs gain a new relevance through simple isolation from their contexts. In this way, Sophie Dvorák acts within the practice of the dysfunctional through omission, that means exactly that the function and flood of information are interrupted, and at the same time, a slowing-down is experienced.
Etymologically observed, the map as a carrier of something written upon it, is seen as a picture fragment, grid, or agglomeration of different layers of the visible. Mappings inserted into the printing media as spaces of events undergo, through the abstraction of art, a breaking-down of identity that makes them as models opposite to those originally intended. Precisely through the emptying out of linguistic information an iconographic fluidity opens up. According to Deleuze/Guattari the map is an anti-geology in a multiplicity of spacetimes. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari remark in “Rhizome”, the map is not a picture anymore, not an illustration, but a rhizome, and as such, an image board. The map as a basic geometrical grid of the world, of coordinates and dimensions, is made into an instrument that potentially takes on the very fundamentals of its representation. It is now no closed system but an open, relational one.
(Text for the catalogue of the XVth International Triennale for Graphic Arts,
by Ursula Maria Probst)