Part Eight / Svätopluk Mikyta, HOLE

Mira Keratová’s extensive study, with artist’s intervention by Svätopluk Mikyta HOLE deals with the genealogy of modernist essentialism from the perspective of feminist criticism. Using the representative example of the development of the work of neo-avant-garde artist Stano Filko (1937–2015) and within the framework of research into the artist’s life’s work, a feminist perspective is used to interpret the author’s documentation, artistic archive, recorded oral history, and research into contemporary criticism. The overall interpretation is framed by the specific geopolitical conditions of socialist modernism in the 1960s, the period of global conservative shift during Czechoslovak normalization in the 1970s, the time of Filko’s emigration during the era of New York cultural wars in the 1980s, as well as the social and identity politics of the era of neoliberal transition in the 1990s.