What does it mean to think through touch?
When Soviet censorship restricted their filmmaking, Jan Švankmajer and Eva Švankmajerová turned to ceramics and experiments in tactilism. Kitchen objects—wooden spoons, pot lids, rolling pins, and teapots—became what they called “alchemistic tools”, pressed against their bodies as crucibles for a new sensory art. In their hands, the everyday object doubled: at once a symbol of bureaucratic order and a site of “mad eroticism”, both prison walls and fertile soil.
This salon will explore Švankmajer’s writings in Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art, alongside his surreal films—from the early stop-motion experiments to Conspirators of Pleasure—to consider how tactilism reimagines the world through touch. We’ll also look at Švankmajerová’s poetry and ceramics, where teapots, clay, and domestic objects become symbols of both rational containment and unruly creativity: “Our task,” they wrote, “is to take the lid off.”
Together we’ll ask: how might tactilism challenge the dominance of vision and rational classification? And what happens when the most ordinary objects become portals to imagination, satire, and sensory liberation?
