Milena Dopitová: The Next Stop Is a Request Stop

Milena Dopitová’s multimedia project for the House of Arts Brno is monumental, but not opulent. The exhibition reflects on the sustainability of cultural, national and ethnic identities, whose impact on Western civilization has been extremely intense. It paraphrases and blends the vocabularies of Christian, Judaic and Arabic traditions – i.e., the cultures that for centuries have most significantly shaped the European “West” (in the sense of the Occident, not the post-war order) – while employing elements that evoke the ordinariness, and to some extent the superficiality, of contemporary life. Dopitová displays an impressive, almost theatrically staged associative “narrative” about the power of human memory, about overcoming the duality of the body and mind and, last but not least, about the instability of the present world.