Kivland, Sharon 2010

It is a matter of forgetting as much as one of remembering or of causal retrieval in the works of Petra Feriancova. The past is an evasive and imprecise location, slipping between the places of private experience and public associations or encounters. Our subjectivity is always a trajectory (perhaps rather a dérive or even a dialectic) between the universal and the particular and back, a looping, folding journey, which produces a fiction about the truth of experience and memory. The works of Feriancova are carefully structured to suggest an (impossible) affective rendezvous (and one must remember that is an exhortation to give oneself up and works of art demand this of their viewers). She works through personal archives, hers and the memory banks of others, through forms that use the lowest technologies to sophisticated stagings. The latter place the viewer both at the centre and the periphery, according (of course) to where one stands, as in any parallax view. Sometimes I do not know what is happening and yet I do, even when the words escape me, for in the strangely logical arrangement sense is produced (or at least, I sense something) and this is enough to demand of the work of art.