Katarína Poliačiková & Eva Priečková

Learning Water, Salty Eyes | 2020 | Performance, video, 15:43 min. | Courtesy of the artists
​​Katarína Poliačiková: Learning Water, Salty Eyes | 2021 | Performance, duration 20 min. | Courtesy of the artist

The video was part of a performance that the artists originally created for the venue of the Hotdock Gallery in Bratislava. It combines visual art and poetry with action and performing art. In the text, which is an important part of the work, they focus on countless forms and psychologies of water: “Water through which we do not return, zigzag or straight, to anyone but ourselves. Water in bodies, bodies in water: It’s somewhere far away, we tell ourselves, yet our water and the one that’s far away are entwined vessels. And so, in the quiet of the night, the iceberg inside us cracks and sows disquiet into our dreams. It doesn’t depart with the morning light, on the contrary, it returns night after night, while somewhere far away a delicate web of cracks begins to show.

 

No water is further away from us than our tears. Our bodies are our water clocks.

 

In the text for the gallery in the middle of the Petržalka residential district, they named people’s compulsive desire to travel to the sea as the return of the lost person home: “In this house, people long for the sea, though they no longer remember why. It is naive to assume that what our body feels is determined by what we know. It is dark, we only see a stripe of light lining the bottom of the bathroom door, submerged in warm water we close our eyes and feel safe; we enter the strangely familiar. Water and darkness return us to innocence before becoming, and now, by virtue of water, we seek to return to what we always were.”