Petra Pìtiletá

Petra Pìtiletá was born in Prague in 1978, studied at the VŠUP in Prague, 1999-2000 (studio of Pavel Nešleha), later she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the studio of Jiøí David. After she left the Academy, she switched to the studio of Veronika Bromová. She worked briefly with her colleagues Jana Doubková, Sylvie Málová and Magdalena Peševová. Pìtiletá and Peševová were curators of a group exhibition Love (Láska, Doubner Gallery, Prague) this year.
For the Stream of Desire (Proud touhy, 2003), performance (which ran in the courtyard of a building in Smíchov—the current residence of the Gallery CO14) Pìtiletá and Doubková dressed up in colorful costumes, donned heavy make-up and improvized some chansons. Their amateurish croaking and bouncing had, according to eyewitnesses, a strong redemptory effect. This is the truth about most of the works of Petra Pìtiletá: They cross the borders of private and public emotions. In the same vein, she created together with Doubková reciprocal portraits in the middle of empty halls, where social meetings had just concluded, or were about to commence. Here we can also feel the tension from the conflict of an inadequate presence in public places and a personal reason to remain.
Some of the videos of Petra Pìtiletá are grounded in personal material (Summer, (Léto), Christmas, (Vánoce), England, 2002-2003) and she uses very endearing language. The overpressure in the video Summer is reached by using photographs and videos from a tour to the sea. It might outrage some people, as it is “material for home archives,” but Pìtiletá tries to find out whether we are able to adopt a simple description of happiness. For the picture Love Your Life (Miluj svùj život, 2003) she asked friends to characterize themselves in eight purely positive sentences. The sentences “I like my body,” “all my relationships are harmonic,” “I am in control of my world,” “everything in my life is all right,” and so on, were given beforehand. Pìtiletá watched how they are able to experience them and identify themselves publicly.
In the video Dialogue (2004) she put herself in the place of a heroine of a romantic film scene. After carefully preparing herself as the original actress, she laboriously simulated the fulfillment of many women’s dreams. Pìtiletá acts in the vintage scene convincingly, and it is difficult to say how frankly she does it. But the author is not interested in self-projection: That’s why she went into guidebooks of the cities she would like to visit. She records in herself the desire of a moving force of action, and in which stereotypes it presents itself. She demonstrates to its fulfillment that you often have no other way than developing an artistic activity.
Slightly aside are the photographs of the English woman—workers in a fruit packing company. Petra Pìtiletá and Magdalena Peševova photographed them in the moment when they switched off the machines. The emptiness, tiredness and surprise in their faces are more impressive when we know that the photos were taken without the permission of the factory management.

01.03.2004