The mirrored sea

Lumír Hladík / Czechoslovakia / 1980 / 10 min.

synopsis

“One day, I came to the realisation that it had been two years since I had last seen the sea. The sea has always been a symbol of freedom. I decided that two years was long enough (from an emotional point of view), and so I went back to the sea, but this time with the intention of not actually ‘seeing’ it. I asked my friends to take me blindfolded to the shores of the Baltic Sea in East Germany along with a large mirror.” Thanks to this action event in particular, it was possible to trace Lumír Hladík’s Czechoslovak work and thereby supplement the notion of action art at the time and its unique connection to film.

biography

Since 1981, Lumír Hladík has lived in Canada where he creates works on the border between conceptual art, action art, drawing, and video. However, the beginnings of his work date back to the 1970s when action art was created on the margins of the Czech art scene. Lumír Hladík was an active member in the body art circle alongside Petr Štembera, Jan Mlčoch and Karel Miler, but he bonded more with his friend Jiří Kovanda through the civility of his own action art. Hladík was among the few who actually documented his action art through film, with many of the events taking form as temporary interventions within the landscape. These recordings, which were originally shot on 8 mm colour film, were recently digitised in the National Film Archive and accompanied with the artist’s own explanations.