BARCELONA.- Ambidexterity is the ability to use both hands indifferently. It is not rare to find people considered ambidextrous who were originally left-handed and who were forced to use their right hand, either deliberately or during their childhood, in institutions such as schools, or at jobs where right-handed habits are demanded. Based on this concept, the artist reflects on how they operate and what are the characteristics of the different institutional systems that structure our lives.

Eva Kot’átková winds up the Lesson 0 exhibition program with a project based on the contrast between art classes as a space for the imagination, and the formal framework in which they take place. The installation transforms Espai 13 into a room that is somewhere between a disintegrating classroom and a stage set conducive to art education. A series of objects used in educational processes involving both children and adults are arranged on a central stage, and also scattered throughout the room. These accessories take on meaning through different performative actions and through the intervention of visitors. The notions of creativity and destruction run through the entire exhibition, which emphasises the paradox arising from using formal frameworks as a channel for the utopian goals associated with the teaching of art.

In conjunction with Eva Kot’átková’s exhibition, the Lesson 0 mediation program Friction Pedagogies takes a reflective turn on the museum as an educational device. The idea is to explore the roles involved in the educational development of the art institution, in order to reconsider the problems and opportunities that emerge at the intersection between art and pedagogy in the museum.

Eva Kot’átková (born 1982, Prague, Czech Republic) studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts until 2008 and later enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Akademie Bildende Künste in Vienna. In 2013 she completed her doctoral studies at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague. In 2007 Kot’átková won the J. Chalupecký Award for Young Artists and the J. Hivka Award. Her group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale (2013), Moscow Biennale (2013), Sydney Biennale (2012) and Lyon Biennale (2011). Her work has been shown at galleries and museums including Staatliche Kunsthalle (Baden-Baden), Scrap Metal Gallery (Toronto), Project Arts Centre (Dublin), Czech Center (New York) (Report on the Reconstruction of the Past), Hunt Kastner (Prague), Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art (Poland), MAO - Modern Art Oxford (United Kingdom) (A Storyteller’s Inadequacy) and Rurart (Rouillé, France) (Unlearning Instincts). Eva’s work is currently exhibited at MIT List Visual Art’s Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts).