The title of the exhibition doesn't refer only to the title of Dora Maurer's works Reversible and Changeable Phases of Movements from 1972, but first of all it is a remark on the situation of artist in this part of Europe in the 70-ties. It was a time when artists had an allowed area of their activities, thereby restricing the freedom. Putting them in strictly designated frame was associated with a political and social situation. Those times in the art of Central Europe it was also a period of parallel action regarding western art.
In Dora Maurer's creative activity those years were characterized by a prominent interest in conceptual art, which later moved more and more towards a fascination with structuralism, also visibled in her early artist's projects. The photographies presented at the exhibition, are a kind of movement analysis, accompanied by the apparent banality of the gestures, with their reproduction and multiplication. The movement is not a link to its mechanical aspect, but to the perceptive understanding. By focusing on the study of variation and individual phases of movement, the artist has collated in different configurations the captured images of sequences of simple actions, which confronted with each other made up the photographic mosaic. Starting from photographies, with time she has begun to build objects in the space ruled by the regime of the structure, which from a flat surface in the photograph has turned into the cool structure in the space. The problem of the structure expressed by the movement and arrangement of space appears also in utopian projects of Jozef Jankovič, which he created aware that they will never be realized due to the times of "normalization", when Jankovič was absent on the artistic scene in Czechoslovakia. On the contrary to to the classical environment, where the viewer is an active participant in, the works of Slovak artist differ passivity and resignation of the recipient. Light and sound installations which are an integral part of the projects, were used to induce the shock in the viewer and more applied to the situation in which at that time was the author than to the conceptual aspects of art. In this case, the work can be read as a picture of mental and physical limitations of human being. At the same time the early years of Jozef Jankovič's art activity was a time of experiments under the influence of new realism and pop art, which were emerging in the structural part of art works. What we can observe aslo in the sculpture Moving hands, presented at the exhibition, which can be regarded as the quintessence of the issue of movement, requires the perception of time and space. The interaction that occurs between the object and the audience, at the begining appears to be surprisingly and accidentaly but after a closer observation it can be seen as a fixed and logical sequence of movements, which makes a coherent whole with photographies of Dora Maurer.