7. 11. – 17. 11. 2024 (opening: Wednesday 6th of November 2024 at 6 pm)
Anežka Abrtová, Richard Fahrner, Štěpán Kus, Tomáš Leba, Veronika Štorková
curated by: Agáta Slámová
graphic design: Pavla Nečásková a Žofia Fodorová
Where do we get all the facts and claims that we accept or refute, where are the truths and conspiracies to be found? The exhibition The Mystique of Knowledge explores the process by which we extract and shape knowledge from the space-time of ordinary life and seeks to look at how the unknown becomes known.
🔮Opening: 6. 11. 2024 at 6 pm
🔮Graphic design: Pavla Nečásková a Žofia Fodorová
🔮PR: Lála Mysl
🔮Open daily: 1–7pm
⭐️GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and Prague city Hall. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
26. 9. – 1. 11. 2024 (opening: Wednesday September 25th 2024 at 6 pm)
Alžběta Krňanská
curated by: Caroline Krzyszton
graphic design: Pavla Zábranská
The exhibition explores the perceptions of female identity through the stereotypical lense of luxury products/ cars. And the role of technology in reproducing this point of view.
💅Opening: 25. 9. 2024 18:00
💅Graphic design: Pavla Zábranská
💅PR: Lála Mysl
💅open: thu–sun 1–7pm
⭐️GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and Prague city Hall. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
8. 8. – 15. 9. 2024 (opening: Wednesday 7th of August 2024 at 6 pm)
Polina Khatsenka, Michal Mitro, Lucie Páchová, Jiří Suchánek, Michal Klodner, Martyna Poznańska, Nikola Brabcová a Karin Šrubařová, Olga Karlíková
curated by: Alexandra Cihanská Machová
graphic design: Pavla Nečásková
First we liberate ourselves from an anthropocentrical definition of sound as a vibration, that is hearable by a human ear, and we admit, that each vibration can possibly be heard by someone, or something. Then it doesn’t matter, whether we perceive the world as an energy – will for an action, or as a string, we always find ourselves in the universe of vibrations, the world made of sound. Sun does not turn around the Earth, the Earth does not turn around the humans, hierarchy is broken up and suddenly everything is equally important. We are looking for the way to go on, out of the catastrophes and traps, into which we got ourselves, we are looking for the true role, position in the ecosystem, if there still is one, the way it was and the way it necessarily changes. We are looking for the ways, how to change our role of humanity as a disease, as a parasite, to a valuable part of the whole, to connect, to integrate, to get in touch, to contact. To listen means an opportunity and possibility to understand, to accept. One must not only listen through the ears. Sound permeates the matter of our bodies, it interferes with their energy, their vibration, their sound. Waves are intertwined and it’s not possible to distinguish the borders, where one thing ends and the other thing begins, everything mingles, shades into each other. We are part of our surrounding, of our environment, our environment passes through us. Sound and transmedial artists discover in their works way of listening, which are not limited by a human ear. Listening of the communication of animals, plants, interspecies, communication of ecospheres.
The exhibition is part of the Take Care Festival(festivaltakecare.cz)and Prague Art Week(pragueartweek.cz) and is accompanied by a series of artist talks and lectures/discussions:
👂1.9. at 4pm____Blind soundwalk with Lucia Páchová
👂1.9. at 6 pm____Deaf soundwalk with Polina Khatsenko
Both Lucie Páchová and Polina Khatsenko are sound artists who both focus on listening, specifically listening to the landscape and environment, with slightly different perspectives. Each of them will lead a walk around the gallery, which is focused on the perception of sound in the environment and its meaning, each with a different limitation and therefore from a different perspective. The walks are followed by a debate over the small refreshment, where we will share impressions from both walks.
👂6.9. at 6 pm____Concert&Artist talk: Jiří Suchánek, Michal Mitro
Jiří Suchánek and Michal Mitro will play a live performance – a concert in their installations Soil choir and Egde of chaos. The concert is followed by a debate with the artists about their work.
👂Opening: st 7.8. 2024 v 18.00
👂Technical support: Ondřej Konrád
👂PR: Lála Mysl
👂open: čt–ne 13–19h/thu–sun 1–7pm
⭐️GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Municipality of the City of Prague. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
27.6. – 7. 7. 2024 (opening: Wednesday June 26 2024 at 6 pm)
Karolína Hnětkovská, Jáchym Ozuna, Lála Mysl
graphic design: Žofia Fodorová, Šimon Vlasák
The final graduation exhibition of the students of the Centre for Audiovisual Studies. The playground as a place to learn important life experiences – to get dirty, to get up after a fall, to deal with boredom, to rewrite the rules. In the game, losing is not a loss; it gives us the opportunity to start again and differently. The three works relate in different ways to playground spaces, their architecture/artistic possibilities/values, their social role and educational potential, or to the principles of their rules and the freedoms they define for us.
⭐️GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and Prague city Hall. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
19.6.2024 – 23.6.2024 (opening: Tuesday June 18 2024 6 pm)
Max Čuhel, Benjamin Bílek, Eri Pelikánů, Tereza Muric, Alena Kolesnikova, Yana Kadurina, Erik Humlíček
graphic design: Šimon Vlasák
Annual exhibition of students of the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies. Presentation of students will take place in two parallel places – in GAMU and INI Gallery.
⭐️GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and Prague city Hall. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
5.6.2023 - 14.6.2023 (opening: Wednesday 5. června 2024 at 6 pm)
A group exhibition of the Intermedia Studio at FAMU in Prague, thematizing alternative work with the gallery space itself, which is transformed into a platform capable of uniting individual works into a unified whole.
During the opening will take part a music performance by following artists:
GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and Prague city Hall. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
Open call AMU Gallery for 2025 The projects can be registered electronically until the 31st of May, 2024 at veronika.danhelova@famu.cz
AMU Gallery hereby announces an open call for exhibition projects to complement the gallery’s program for 2025. The call is intended for both Czech and foreign artists and curators; applications may be sent both in Czech and in English. Due to the wide spectrum of subjects taught at AMU (The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) we prefer thematic, curatorial exhibition projects with interdisciplinary overlap, or exhibitions based around artistic research (especially in the field of photography and new media). The duration of exhibitions in GAMU span from four to six weeks.
📌Required application materials:
• a detailed description of the project, including visual documentation which takes into account the gallery’s spatial dimensions (max. three standard pages of text)
• a structured CV/bio of the applicant
• brief CVs/bios of the exhibited artists, including a showcase of their work/links
to online portfolio
• the exhibition’s budget with proposed additional sources of funding
📌The AMU Gallery provides:
• oversight at the exhibition
• technical support
• graphic processing and printing of accompanying materials (invitations,
posters, banners)
• basic PR (press release, announcement of the exhibition on the website and fcb, advertisement in the printed Artmap, newsletter, TZ on Artalk)
• production costs up to CZK 30,000 (material, installation, de-installation), depending on the gallery’s budget for the given year
📌The AMU Gallery, based at Malostranské náměstí 12, has been operating under the auspices of The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague since 2008. Its mission is to foster conditions for the presentation and critical reflection of contemporary art, with a particular focus on the youngest generation of artists. An integral part of the program also comprises graduation projects from The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and select student works from other art schools. The second, equally important, thrust of the gallery’s dramaturgy consists of complex curatorial exhibitions of established artists, both Czech and from abroad, whose work engages with the field of new media, or in some original way transcends the boundaries of traditional artistic disciplines.
11.4. – 31.5.2024 (opening: Wednesday April 10th 2024 at 6pm)
Jozef Mrva ml., Philipp Kolychev
curated by: Šimon Kadlčák
graphic design: Šimon Vlasák
A response to recent social transformations and the current housing crisis. The aim of the project is to reflect the changes in the understanding of the concept of “home” in the 21st century. What happens to the social structure of society when the most important values of life are dictated by the economic system? 👻Technical support: Ondřej Konrád 👻PR: Lála Mysl 👻Graphic desig: Šimon Vlasák 👻open: čt–ne 13–19h 👻facebook event
GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Municipality of the City of Prague. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
23. 2. – 29. 3. 2024 (opening: thursday 22nd of February 2024 at 6pm)
Fuad Alymani, Jakub Hons, Jana Preková, Michelle Joy, Kateryna Khramtsova, Yeva Kupchenko, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Václav Mach, Felicia Rice, Martin Zetová
curated by: Gabriela Benish-Kalná
“As artists, we live on the periphery. But we are the mirrors. We are the reflective points that break through a barrier.” -Cannupa Hanska Luger
With the rise of global information infrastructure we have become direct witnesses to the growing number of humanitarian and (un)natural disasters, wars, armed conflict and displacement. Most of these geopolitical crises are perceived to occur on the periphery relative to the Euro-Western world. This exhibition explores various artistic practices as a language that transcends borders, bringing the periphery closer to the center. Louder holds space for different artistic approaches as responses, reactions and resistance to these crises, creating a space of amplification.
“The role of the artist in the social structure follows the need of the changing times: In time of social stasis: to activate In time of germination: to invent fertile new forms In time of revolution: to extend the possibilities of peace and liberty In time of violence: to make peace In time of despair: to give hope In time of silence: to sing out ” – Judith Malina
⚡️Graphic design: Žofia Fodorová ⚡️Technical support: Jonáš Balcar, David Škourek, Jakub Hons, Václav Mach ⚡️PR: Lála Mysl ⚡️Open: thu-sun 1-7pm ⚡️facebook event
26. 01. – 04. 02. 2024 (opening: thursday 25. ledna 2024 v 18h)
Tereza Chudáčková, Eva Rotreklová, Viktorie Štěpánová, Alena Kolesnikova, Eliška Lubojatzká, M. A. Šulc, Matěj Martinec, Tara Šelířová, David Šourek, Jonáš Balcar Adam Kácha, Michaela Kozáková, Veronika Poslední, Emma Erben, Benjamin Bílek, Max Čuhel, Eva Gabrižová, Erik Humlíček, Eri Pelikánů, Yana Kadurina, Tereza Muricová, Sofie Gjuričová, Nikola Šmeralová
graphic design: Šimon Vlasák
Annual exhibition of students of the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies, workshops of Marie Lukáčové a Martina Blažíček.
Exhibition of semestral works of the 1st years students of Studio of Classic Photography and outputs from the long-term project Soutok, exploring the urban landscape.
authors:
Barbora Nosková, Ema Mihálová, Filip Doležal, Adéla Geierová, Jan Liška, Krylou Dzianis, Anna Smutná, Eliška Suchá, Rosalie Tomková, Viktória Weiszová, Feiyun Zhao, Kuba Nowak Mikolaj, Katarzyna Serwatka, Antoni Wojciech Swark, Jsoue Aguiniga Valadez, Ashir Singh, Lucie Hradecká, Natálie Hájková, Sabina Můráňová, Michaela Stehlíková, Barbora Vyhnálová
14. 12. 2023–12. 1. 2024 (opening: Wednesday 13th of December 6pm)
Tereza Chudáčková, Mária Júdová, Kateřina Konvalinová
curated by: Lea Petříková
graphic design: Šimon Vlasák
production: Eliška Klimešová
Presenting the work of contemporary artists working with the moving image, the exhibition addresses the topic of altered states of consciousness in various contexts. Connecting the concept of “alterity”, or what theorist Anna Powell calls “altered states,” with the moving images of contemporary artists, it provides a means for exploring the possibility of shifts and alterations in the sensory, spiritual, social and political contexts.
Mária Júdová graduated from the Digital Media department of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica and the Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU. She is interested in the potential of digital technologies, especially in the context of dance and movement performance; she creates audiovisual performances, interactive installations and XR works. She has exhibited at various venues (e.g. Sonar Hong Kong, Japan Media Arts Festival, Cinedans, Berlin Atonal, Sensorium, and others) and has for example collaborated with Rambert Contemporary Dance Company in London or the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Tereza Chudáčková is a student of the MA program at the Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU, where she also received her BA. She is involved with moving image and sound work, and is member of the sound trio Seaslugs. Her film Krásně sviť a krásně hleď, z uší roste krasohled, made in collaboration with Klára Ondráčková, received Special Mention in the Exprtmntl.cz competition of experimental films as part of the MFDF Ji.hlava 2020. Kateřina Konvalinová graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and is currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology. She has also studied at DAMU and at the Indonesian Seni Institut Yogyakarta. She works mostly with video and is involved in participative projects and ecological farming. She has had solo exhibitions at etc. Gallery, City Surfer Office or Berlínskej Model, and also raps as part of the Lobbyboy&saab900turbo project.
3. 11.— 3. 12. 2023 (opening: 2nd of November 2023 6 pm)
Tereza Bartůňková, Darja Čančíková, Jan Čumlivski, Palo Čejka, Rebecca Gray, Barbora Haplová, Tomáš Hauser, Jiří Havlíček, Juraj Horváth, Františka Iblová, Tomáš Klepoch, Kateřina Košíková, Martin Kubát, Monogramista T•D, Kryštof Pešek, George Radojčič, Barbora Satranská, Matěj Smetana, Jantra Šímová, František Týmal, understructures, Karolína Vilímovská, Anna Vohralíková, Anna Wysocká, Alžběta Zemanová
curated by: Michal Kindernay & Klára Zahrádková
graphic design: Žofia Fodorová, Magdalena Konečná
The exhibition thematizes the art of author’s book & author’s and hand-made film and defines the meeting point of materiality, traditional, experimental and contemporary tendencies in the approach to the artistic categories of two different media. The book established itself as a modern work of art in the ’60s, while the film does so at the time of the world avant-garde. Both experimental forms of the traditional medium oscillate on the border of a constant dialogue between contemporary art and the rich inner, often solitary worlds of the authors, their voices are heard sometimes only after the fact or through lucky finds in estates, drawers or archives. Invited authors are complex artists, participating in all stages of the creation and preparation of the work, including the selection of paper, format, binding, as well as publication and distribution. The selection of author’s books and films points to the tendencies of contemporary artists who maintain a creative dialogue with the medium of books and films. The author’s books in the gallery are transformed into installations or gallery situations, the films leave the projectors and offer new reading possibilities.
Graphic design: Žofia Fodorová, Magdalena Konečná Instalation: Patrik Trska, Mikuláš Suchý, Honza Tomšů, Ondřej Konrád, autoři a kurátoři Special thanks: Zdeněk Helfert, Anka Helfertová, Kristina Fišerová, Marie Kohoutová, Michaela Kukovičová, Ondřej Trnka, Vladimír Just PR: Lála Mysl open: thu-sun 13-19h facebook event
2. 11.— 5. 12. 2023 (opening: 2nd of November 2023 6 pm)
curated by: NAMU
The international exhibition of freshly released publications in the fields of film, music, theatre, dance, photography, and new media will take place this year in the AMU Gallery on Malostranské náměstí. This time, part of the books and the accompanying programme is dedicated to the topic of sustainability in the arts.
20.10. – 29. 10. 2023 (opening: Thursday 19th of October at 6pm )
Johannes J. Wagner, Jan Štěpánek, Jenny Sternwaldová, Eliška Drastíková, Gustav Sonntag. Anna Šmídová, Miroslav Jirele, Susan Witwer, Tomáš Honz, Kateřina Hubená, Roland Gräfe
graphic design: Žofia Fodorová
The Central Bohemian Highlands’ unique landscape and its cone-shaped hills of volcanic origin have inspired artists from both the Czech Republic and Germany for centuries. Since the Romantic era, painters like Caspar David Friedrich, Adrian Ludwig Richter, and Antonín Mánes have found new stimuli and motifs for their work here. Later on, many other Czech and German artists followed in their footsteps. The LANDSCAPE ’23 exhibition, created as part of the Czech-German open-air cultural centre Řehlovice, offers a diverse range of creative approaches and a fresh perspective on the Central Bohemian Highlands through the eyes of contemporary artists. The participants of the plein air, organized by the Roland Gräfe Foundation – Foundation for Art and Culture in cooperation with the Department of Scenography of the Prague DAMU, were inspired by the Central Bohemian Highlands’ landscape and painted for three days in various locations around Řehlovice and Litoměřice.
15. 9.—14. 10. 2023 (opening: thursday 14. září v 18h)
Veronika Čechmánková, Gijs Gieskes, Lukáš Jasanský a Martin Polák, Ruta Putramentaite, Kateřina Konvalinová, Denisa Langrová, Erika Velická
curated by: Martin Netočný
exhibition architecture: Petr Lhoťan
graphic design: Pavla Nečásková, Šimon Vlasák
production: Josefína Frýbová
The exhibition O the Hoe, the Hoe, the Hoe is about the ways of storytelling. Through the displayed objects and other artefacts it seeks to present stories in which the human being occupies the position of one of many relevant subjects. Thus, we encounter several new types of narratives that are not mere instruments leading the audience and the spectators to their conclusion, but rather a form of their own that grants itself and everything it encompasses a certain degree of autonomy. If we step back for a moment, we find that the landscape around us could one day become such a self-formed story as well. What role do the means of contemporary art play in its redefi nition is not yet noticeably clear. At first glance, however, it is evident that they co-create a space in which new forms of storytelling constitute a central creative principle. Th is exhibition is no different.
Side events:
To the Last Turf, 23 September from 1:00 p.m.
meeting in front of GAMU (Malostranské náměstí 12, Prague 1), duration: 90 min.
A guided walk through the city’s parks focusing on the collection and use of herbs growing outside the attention of urban green space managers and ordinary visitors.
Let Me Lie in a Lye, 12 October from 5:00 p.m.
GAMU (Malostranské náměstí 12, Prague 1), duration: 90 min.
The herbs, which have enriched the exhibition by being dried here, will find practical use by being sewn into bathing pillows. The workshop will guide the participants through the making of simple objects for the preparation of herbal baths. The program is designed for children and adults who do not suffer from hay fever.
Guided Tour, 7 September from 1:00 p.m.
GAMU (Malostranské náměstí 12, Prague 1), duration: 45 min.
A guided tour of the exhibition with the curator will provide a space for discussion about the works represented, the concepts used, and anything related to what is not present in the gallery.
10.8. – 9.9.2023 (opening: wednesday 8th of August 2023 at 6pm)
Artur Magrot
curated by: Nina Moravcová
graphic design: Šimon Vlasák
In the last year, Artur Magrot has consciously chosen a life of long-term homelessness in hopes of finding alternatives for movement in a system of which we are unwillingly a part. He examines the ideas of home or personal space, concepts we were forced to view from a completely new perspective during the pandemic. His insights are captured through text and visual records. Using thermal cameras, he photographed his temporary refuges — places of heat accumulation. In an effort to capture the invisible but present imprints of the body, he created, among other things, a bizarre calendar charting the trajectories of his own movements over the past year. This Instant Game – as he calls his latest project – is now over.
For Magrot, it has been an extraordinary experience and a contribution to his thematic research, dealing with the delineation of his own space, the consideration of strategies of power surveillance, and the role modern technology plays in these spheres. He intends to translate his experiences into an exhibition project for GAMU and further evaluate it in the framework of his PhD studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
During the show opening there will be playing Ocassional Djs.
Scenography, Production Design for Film, Costume/Mask, Independent Artistic Work
The student exhibition in the studio of KS DAMU – PQ23 is a combined exhibition of artworks and spatial objects/installations from the period 2019 – 2023. The objects and artworks are a link between the academic and artistic focus of the Department of Scenography, the theme of PQ23, the term “Rare” and the continuous process of exploring and rethinking what all the term scenography implies.
8 – 14 June GAMU
The exhibition will be open 8 – 14 June 2023 13h – 19h
8 – 18 June 2023, DAMU Department of Scenography – 4th floor of the main building, Karlova 26, 116 65, Prague 1
Opening: June 8, 2023, at 17.00
The exhibition will be open from 9 – 18 June 2023 10h – 18h
Commented visit: 15 June 2023 at 16.00
Adam Kácha, Tereza Chudáčková, Jonáš Balcar, Eva Rotreklova, Tara Šelírová
curated by: Marie Lukáčová
Annual exhibition of students of the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies, workshops of Marie Lukáčové, Georgy Bagdasarov a Martin Blažíček. Open daily 1 — 7pm
23.05.2024 (opening: úterý 23. května 2023 v 21 h)
Simona Rozložníková
There’s a fly crawling on the window, the fat one they call the butcher. It’s been crossing the window pane for ages. People usually loathe it, but it’s actually beautiful, metallic green and blue, with translucent wings woven with silver threads. It’s been crawling on the glass for a long time, and it doesn’t know how to get out. Outside, the sun is shining, the colours are brilliant and the wind is blowing. She could fly all she wants. It’s just the window that keeps her here! There must be a crack somewhere to get out of this dull, grey room. Out of the loneliness. And finally! There she is! She’s found it. It was high time. The sun was just setting, the sky had turned a beautiful color, she’d enjoy the colors a little more!
( Milena Strafeld – About the one called Toyen)
Graduation performance of Simona Rozložnikova, student of the Department of Nonverbal Theatre, HAMU. It is a site specific immersive theatre … a kind of “pantomimic exhibition” set in the AMU Gallery. Inspired by the life, personality and work of TOYEN.
Concept, direction and acting : Simona Rozložníková
Pedagogical direction and supervision : Radim Vizváry
Set and costumes: Aleš Vancl
Light design : Lukáš Klíma
“In the darkened hall of life, I watch the projection screen of my brain ”
Toyen https://fb.me/e/2vI3BjNY8
Louisa Havránková, Ava Holtzman, Eliška Klimešová, Adam Rolex, Tereza Šimoníková, Jakub Tulinger, Šimon Varaus
curated by: Jiří Ptáček
graphic design: Magdalena Konečná, Šimon Vlasák, Pavla Nečásková, Žofia Fedorová
In geology, the term drunken forest refers to vegetation growth growing on a slowly slumping hillside. The tree trunks grow in all sorts of crooked ways and the forest looks disorganized. For geologists, this signals that the bedrock is moving. In the exhibition’s title, where students from the studios of the FAMU Department of Photography in Prague will meet, the drunken forest refers to the instability of the conditions in which these young people grow up and to artistic creation as repeated attempts to maintain balance. Through their works, however, the exhibition also points out how the tool we generically call photography and its department; reacts to these movements
AMU Gallery hereby announces an open call for exhibition projects to complement the gallery’s program for 2023.
The call is intended for both Czech and foreign artists and curators; applications may be sent both in Czech and in English. Due to the wide spectrum of subjects taught at AMU (The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) we prefer thematic, curatorial exhibition projects with interdisciplinary overlap, or exhibitions based around artistic research (especially in the field of photography and new media).
The duration of exhibitions in GAMU span from three to six weeks.
Required application materials:
a detailed description of the project, including visual documentation which takes into account the gallery’s spatial dimensions (max. three standard pages of text)
a structured CV/bio of the applicant
brief CVs/bios of the exhibited artists, including a showcase of their work/links to online portfolio
the exhibition’s budget with proposed additional sources of funding
The projects can be registered electronically until the 31th of May, 2023 at veronika.danhelova@famu.cz
The AMU Gallery provides:
oversight at the exhibition
technical support
graphic processing and printing of accompanying materials (invitations, posters, banners)
basic PR
opening night (vernissage)
some of the production costs (material, installation, de-installation), depending on the gallery’s budget for the given year
The gallery’s blueprint and photo documentation of the exhibition space can be found here
Aika Akhmetova, Ella CB, Sarah Dubná, Natasja Loutchko, SPIT (Marta Orlando, Clémentine Roy, Natasja Loutchko), Hana Garová, Mary Neely and Mika Bar-On Nesher
curated by: Natálie Kubíková
Each approach is represented in the exhibition as an intimate observational tool with which to collectively consider the concept of queerness within constructs such as family, friendships, relationships and other social interactions. Issues of family, neighborhood or cultural stereotypes are presented in a group exhibition of international female and non-binary authors. The works on display focus on artistic practices without explicitly recognizing contemporary queer culture and refer to more intimate levels of communication and transmission of information, resistance or background. The exhibition refers predominantly to the more intimate level of depicting female homosexual narratives and addresses the eclipse of lesbian presence in the collective imagination.
Michael Lozano, Jakub Prašivka, Jonathan-Antonín Machander, Raphael Taterka,Tatiana Lvovská, Radim Hořelka, Lisa Philippon, Yutong Xie, Quoc Vinh Tran, Jakub Tulinger, Sarah Kidder, Swati Indeera Parwani
The Studio of Documentary Photography offers a short-term yet unique opportunity to peer into the minds of those sensitive to the world around them – whether that’s gender inequality, climatically arrogant grand gestures on Kralický Sněžník, the Vietnamese community’s view of life as grocers, American wrestling culture, the garden and community of one’s home, creatures awaiting their army-style book, responses to the meaning of art, images cultivated with yeast, a dialogue between two Indian women over the cultural erasure of their identities, the bent backs of people hypnotized by their phone screens, the happiness and safety of one valley in China’s Xinjiang province, or the inherent hierarchies in public spaces such as Bohnice’s psychiatric hospital. We don’t have to scream to be heard, so now we whisper — You won’t see this anywhere else.
14. – 20. 6. 2022, open from 1pm to 7pm (opening: 13. 6. 2022 od 18:30)
Karolína Hnětkovská, Klára Kacířová, Matej Martinec, Jáchym Ozuna, Gabriela Palijová, Tamara Pauknerová, Tomáš Rampula, Anastasia Rybalchenko, Alexandra Sihelská, Sofia Sováková, Žil Julie Vostalová
curated by: Georgy Bagdasarov
In crossing, transformation is a central theme; from one place to another and sometimes through various stages of being created. If characters are connected by “transition” – moving back (or forward or backward) but not forwards/downwards at all can be very confusing for newcomers… it’s hard now because they never really understood that you could change places without changing anything if your mind was clear on everything else! The idea behind the transition is to make things interesting and less frustrating. The world looks too real: buildings, roads start ticking together right before their time gets out of hand yet feel like new objects in a completely different fashion every second we go around them; so these transitions happen with more speed than usual even when nothing truly breaks here…
November 19 – December 19, 2021 (opening: Opening day on Thursday November 18, 2021, from 1 PM to 7 PM)
Aleš Čermák
Supervision: Jindřiška Křivánková, Jakub Gottwald, Jan Bárta, Petr Skala, Matouš Hejl
Theoretical support: Jakub Albert Ferenc, Marie Štindlová
Sound design: Matouš Hejl
Graphic design: Terezie Štindlová
Technical support: HAMU/ GAMU
Duration of the project: November 19 – December 19, 2021
Opening day on Thursday November 18, 2021, from 1 PM to 7 PM
When we say body, we mean that constantly undulating assemblage of bones, meat and blood, but in fact, no such entity exists. The illusory feeling of a physically existing self. In each individual pore of the body we see endless spaces – empty spaces of wisdom – spaces of creativity.
The collection of texts TTN1-TTN3 contains texts from all three parts of TTN. The texts are arranged chronologically and also contain an updated edition of the work-in-progress text Endless Manual: The Transversal Navigation
The exhibition entitled The Autumn Pruning presents the work of Karel Vostárek – artist, scenographer, director and teacher at DAMU’s Department of Drama in Education – which he has created over the span of the last 40 years. The exhibition will present his design proposals, scenography mock-ups, puppets, scenic objects and photographs from projects and performances, as well as his sculptural works and the documentation of previously realized projects. The exhibition will also feature a video projection.
Světlana Malinová, Anežka Horová, Marina Hendrychová, Abelardo Gil Fournier, Matěj Martinec, František Fekete, Daniel Burda, Aleš Zůbek
curated by: Lukáš Likavčan
The “metabolic perspective” begins with the idea that the human economy is merely a continuation of the natural economy by other means, to the extent that terms such as ’logistics’ or ’infrastructure’ can be applied equally well to industrial parks and ecosystems, to the production and transportation of goods, as well as to photosynthesis and food chains. But what if we were to begin considering human culture and communication as part of the planet’s natural metabolisms? Would we not find around us animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, inanimate objects and entire communities of organisms that are constantly speaking to us, showing us something, warning us?
July 15 – August 27, 2021 (THE EXHIBITION IS EXTENDED UNTIL SEPTEMBER 3, 2021) (opening: on Thursday July 15, 2021, from 1 PM to 7 PM)
Author of the project: Aleš Čermák Theoretical support: Jakub Albert Ferenc Supervision: Jindřiška Křivánková, Jakub Gottwald, Matouš Hejl, Petr Skala Guests: Roman Radkovič Collective Graphic design: Terezie Štindlová Sound design: Matouš Hejl Documentation: GAMU English translation: Vít Bohal Curator and Project Coordinator: Petr Krátký (GAMU)
Hands and other limbs are considered part of the body. Why then couldn’t all beings who possess a body be considered as part of a single being? There is no such thing as a disabled body, but only disabled socioeconomic systems.
From the perspective of the other, being slow needn’t be considered a weakness, and the weak/weaker needn’t be slow/slower – they merely achieve a different speed than the speed of the medium which they inhabit at the given time. A “sick” person needn’t mean “visibly sick”. Sickness also includes that which has not yet been recognized, and which is treated as if it weren’t sick at all. To accept one’s vulnerability and fragility in order to reorganize – reprogram relationships, not only towards oneself, but also within a broader social context.
Are our bodies this dangerous biological factor? Is the body itself at the core of this crisis? Do we only start paying attention to bodies once they become sick? Are there more types of invisibility? Is invisibility beyond everyday experience? What does it mean to stand next to an invisible one?
In the fictional world of the Japanese sci-fi Final Fantasy, we encounter the fantastical features of the sword & sorcery genre, alternative historical facts, manga characters, variously stylized cartoon entities, as well as fairly everyday characters. At first sight, this wild mash-up of genres and features of both eastern and western (pop-)cultures is a chaotic, eclectic world of appropriation, but it also indexes a world where History overlaps with dreams, personal memory, and the private spirituality of its actors. The exhibition features the end-of year, final works of students of the Center for Audiovisual Studies, and adopts the title of the game series as a reference point from which to better grasp the long, global pandemic as a necessary ideal – a new “final fantasy” of the coming future. If the experiences of the last two years constitute a dividing line between the old world and the new, what is this new world we are now entering? The final fantasy refers to the current reconfiguration of ideas about the future as a place of entrenched spirituality, magic and private ritual. Much like in the game world, features of identity and the abstract concept of substance (which can mean a chemical substance, matter, principle, or a base) are key here, and serve as the foundation for the practical bridging of the contradiction between nature and technology, as well as instruments and energy. The exhibited works in a certain sense stand poised on the threshold between the 3D visuality of game environments, ARG games, virtual reality, traditional methods and crafts, such as ceramics, print and natural materials. These however do not create mutual tension, but rather constitute a coherent medium for the narration of personal mythologies.
The individual presentation of the VR project Cuddle Therapy is part of the exhibition and will take place on the dates specified on the Galerie AMU Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/galerie.amu
Accompanying program:
Shine Bright Like a Diamond Lucie Myslíková
A city game, 90 mins.
Friday, 25 June, 5 – 6.30 PM
The city game Shine Bright Like a Diamond is the final outcome of Lucie Myslíková’s residency at the INI space, during which she addressed the issue of contemporary living conditions. The players’ objective is to become the perfect candidates for acquiring housing at a luxurious residence. The game will start at 5 PM in the space of the Diamond River housing residence, then there will be a shared walk to the INI space. See more at fb.com/iniprojectprostor
Cuddle therapy is a form of therapy which focuses on asexual contact and shows just how much contemporary society is deprived of it. Touch is able to produce the hormone oxytocin which promotes social behavior and gives us a sense of safety. Due to the pandemic measures, we attempted to simulate cuddle therapy by means of virtual space and haptic objects. The installation can be visited individually during specified times, after registering at fb.com/galerie.amu
10 – 18 June, 2021 (opening: Opening day: 10 June, 2021 from 1 PM to 7 PM (from 5 PM with the personal participation of the authors))
Immaterial Intervention IIIII
Interpretation
Idea
Information
Inventiveness
Inspiration
Interpretation centers in process and in the landscape
Photo FAMU + DAMU KALD + Multimedia VŠE + IPR PRAHA
present the outcomes of their semestral works focusing on the preparation of interpretation centers in the area of the future peri-urban park Soutok (Confluence).
Presentations of the works-in-progress and of the ideas of students from three universities, who are preparing interpretation stations in the landscape around the planned peri-urban park Soutok. The projects were created in mental and hybrid space over a period of many restrictions on free movement. Over the summer months, the projects will see their materialization in assembled teams, materials and spaces. The first physical performance will take place at the very tip of the confluence of Berounka and Vltava on the day of the summer equinox.
Organizational team: Martin Stecker, Štěpánka Šimlová, Tomáš Žižka, Zdeněk Vondra, Zdeněk Ent
27. 5. – 3. 6. 2021 (opening: Opening day: 27. 5. 2021 1pm - 7pm / at 5 PM with the personal participation of the authors)
Vilma Bořkovec, Veronika Loulová
curated by: Ondřej Brody, Mark Ther
exhibition architecture: Matěj Kos
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
“Yes, it’s true! We brought Mozart’s penis from Salzburg”.
Opera directors Veronika Loulová and Vilma Bořkovec set out to explore their frustrations about the opera world – where each seeks to express these grievances through her own particular style. In their first and probably last exhibition LAST SURVIVORS they take a critical look at the boundaries of opera and the rigidity of the system that still prevails in opera.
Veronika Loulová and Vilma Bořkovec: LAST SURVIVORS
GAMU, premiere 27 May 2021
Score: 30 %
You either laugh or you cry. There is nothing else to be done for GAMU’s most recent exhibition LAST SURVIVORS – you won’t survive otherwise.
Perhaps every averagely informed opera lover knows the plot of the famous work about maestro Mozart, the painter Beran and the lascivious police chief Švejdar, who wants to circumcise the painter [VB1] and have his penis all to himself.
The year is 2021, and the setting is Prague during the Napoleonic wars, which also play a central part. But the artists of this production scramble the plotlines any way they like. It is true that the exceptional imagination of the artist duo and the force of the drama which they show can, at certain points, overcome the work’s overall temporal disunity.
However, the evocative dinosaurs running around in uniform only distract the viewer and draw attention away from the intimate story itself, which in the overall production seems to stand as if frozen. It also seems Loulová and Bořkovec perhaps just read a mere synopsis of the story, and do not know the libretto, much less the musical score.
One morbid detail is the torture of Mozart, whom the artists have harassed with an electric knife, while Beran, keeping to the libretto, speaks about the poor wretch having “a belt of nails fastened to his temples”. It is a trifle which completes the final scene, where Mozart is at the top of the Angelic Castle where he is to be circumcised at dawn. The characters walk the stage, but do not express any emotion and there is no passion between them – although when they do attempt this, their interactions achieve an almost parodic level of drama.
The exhibition can be taken with a dose of good humor, but the overall production is rather a thing to sleep through. Perhaps the dozing of the audience is broken by the finale where Mozart is supposed to commit suicide by throwing himself off the ramparts of the Angelic Castle. The artists resolve this in different ways, but the plunge which they have in GAMU certainly has no equal on the world’s stages: Mozart runs upstairs from the office, probably falls through the ceiling (that’s a figurine though) and irrupts into the basement, or perhaps into hell, riling up a cloud of dust.
The entire exhibition ought to follow his trip to the nether, or it ought to at least be quickly forgotten about.
Ondřej Brody and Mark Ther
—
Thanks to:
Video Želvuška: Performer: Anna Benháková Camera, Editing: Juliana Moska Lights: Vojtěch Brtnický
Video Violetta: Violetta: La Cuntessa Camera, Editing: Lenka Karaka
Recording: Kristýna Fílová Ahmad Jafar Hedar
Video dinosaurs: Camera, Editing: Filip Kopecký
Lease of props: Jakub Mejsnar Judita Mejstříková RUN OPERUN z.s.
Mozart’s penis: Model: Martin Talaga Cast: Jan Haubelt
Installation: Jiří Procházka
Special thanks to: Adriana Spišáková Marek Špitálský Justina Urbanová
Release of the online exhibition: 11th of May 2021
The artists Viktor Takáč and Milan Mazúr most often work through the medium of film, developing various technical solutions and formal approaches. They are also interested in the space in which the viewer observes their works, and their projects articulate not only the medium of the moving image itself, but also study its overlaps with the possibilities present in the gallery space and foreground the role of an actor as a possible mover of the narration and facilitator of mutual interaction. Both artists attempt to deconstruct the schema of linear narration and thus compose new audiovisual wholes which might be based on their own rules and tools. They have been employing these themes throughout their doctoral studies under the guidance of Tomáš Svoboda in the studio of New Media at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. The planned exhibition at GAMU is their first collaborative project.
Supervision: Jindřiška Křivánková, Jakub Gottwald, Jan Bárta, Matouš Hejl
Graphic Design: Terezie Štindlová
Sound Design: Matouš Hejl
Technical Support: Jaro Repka
Documentation: GAMU
English Translation: Vít Bohal
Project Curator and Coordinator: Petr Krátký (GAMU)
Strange Homelessness: Dreaming as Real Praxis is the title of the first part of The Transversal Navigation project and will be presented in three phases throughout 2021 in the AMU Gallery. Due to the pandemic regulations, the project’s first phase will not be open to the public. The individual parts will be presented throughout on the project’s website.
Let’s for a while consider waking life and dreaming together. If our dreams were duly interconnected, so that every night the same people and the same circumstances returned, we would be unsure as to what is waking and what is dream. And so, if we speak about a waking state, we must also include a state of dreaming. We dream for a single reason, and that is to access reality.
The Transversal Navigation project is conceived as a distributed experimental praxis, a coherent flow of experience within which the human is exposed to a vaster and ever more complex configuration of consciousness, while experiencing the incessant observation of things again from tiny, improbable places and perspectives. The transversal navigation is a collaboration of the environment – an ecology of praxis.
The Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the Site Specific Master’s studio: Nikola Isaković, Jana Nunčič, Nikola Janković, Anna Dobiášová, Tereza Mitro
exhibition concept: Štěpánka Šimlová, Tomáš Žižka
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
Exhibition is not open to audience.
A collaboration exhibition project of Photo FAMU and the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
The students of Photo FAMU photographically map the surroundings of Confluence, where throughout the next semester they will work on doing artistic research of the landscape.
As part of their studies, the students collaborate on the project which pilots a suburb park called Confluence, where they will apply site specific and creative methods of art production of so-called live art (which employs the use of theater performance, and participatory and action art) and will use the methodology of so-called interpretation centers, i.e. mobile field situations developed in order to facilitate the understanding and spread of knowledge about natural, historical and cultural values of a given region.
Accompanying program: February 18, 2021 from 6 pm live stream performance of the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater DAMU, master Studio site-specific: Above the Fish World
The exhibition Hour between a Dog and a Wolf, the Studio of Classical Photography Photo FAMU, is also currently taking place at GAMU.
Afanasy Shishebarov, Alexandra Chudá, Anežka Pithartová, Ava Holtzman, Cyprian Sprawka, Eduard Peleška, Eva Palčič, Flore Rigoigne, Jakub Pavlík, Jonathan Machander, Kacper Senkowski, Kristýna Mikulková, Yucheng Lin, Natálie Hájková, Natálie Pešková, Olivia Morris Andersén, Raphael Taterka, Said Babayev, Václav Sobek
exhibition concept: Štěpánka Šimlová, Tomáš Žižka
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
Exhibition is not open to audience.
Exhibition project of the first year of the Photo FAMU Classic Photography Studio.
The twilight kindly completes an object’s contours. Darkness denudes reality.
(Luis Sepulvéda)
The hour between dog and wolf, when the difference between the two cannot be distinguished, indicates something much more profound than just the time of day. At this time, each being becomes its own shadow, that is something different than itself. It is a time of metamorphosis, when half the people wish for and the rest dread the dog becoming wolf. The label for this time has been handed down from early Medieval ages, when village people believed such transformation could take place anytime.
From the perspective of the astronomers, dusk and dawn are the times of day when the Sun’s center is located between the 0 and 18th degree under the horizon. In this time frame, which can be fixed to about an hour before sunrise and an hour after sunset, the surroundings are not wholly illuminated, nor are they completely dark. The sunlight coming from below the horizon and reflected by the sky is characteristic of its immense softness, an absence of shadow and the silhouettes of objects framed against its backdrop.
The central condition for the works created as part of the Studio of Classical Photography of FAMU during the Winter semester of 2020 was exactly this hour before the arrival or departure of daylight. In terms of genre and theme, the works focus on landscape, architecture, portraiture, nude, still-life, as well as staged and documentary works. Creating the works in exteriors was not obligatory, and the students were encouraged to work with the above-mentioned character of natural light also near interior windows, or in a daylight studio. The condition was however the use of classic film material, and not video or digital devices. But the choice of format, film sensitivity and camera type, including pinhole cameras and other experimental devices remained wholly at the students’ discretion. Honor the hour when a single hue can become the cosmos!
The Confluence exhibition is taking place in the GAMU, at the same time. It is a collaboration project of Photo FAMU and the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theater of the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
Biggest gift you can give to someone is your Č/CAS
Outputs from the workshops of the Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU in Prague.
As artists we lost the possibility of exhibiting in art galleries due to the current situation, we take it upon ourselves to fulfill another role of art –service.
We decided to open up AMU gallery through a service hatch operating from 1pm to 5pm during the exhibition period; offering fragments of our student’s winter semester finals (statuettes, stills, ceramic installations) for financial support of your choice.
The serving hatch in the AMU Gallery has several functions: it comments on the relationship between art and its representation, it is a social act of a community character, a souvenir shop, a ticket for screenings and also importantly a supporting collection. You will be able to help and also see the works of CAS students in compliance with current covid-19 restictions and in open space.
We disagree with the decision of polish government to ban abortions in their country so we dedicate all the proceeds from the sale of GIFTSHOP to Ciocia Czesia, group that started self-organized grassroots platform for people from Poland who can’t access abortion safely and legally.
Artists: Olga Mikh Fedorova, Dominik Gajarský, Olga Krykun, Barbora Látalová, Zden Brungot Svíteková Curated by Viktor Čech Architect: Matěj Kos Graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek CGI@3D: Marek Bulíř, Jáchym Moravec
The last, third part of the project focused on the relationship between contemporary art, choreography and contemporary dance is devoted to the issue of physical movement as space-time (dis)continuity. Perception of time and movement of the human body in contemporary video, performance and dance. The exhibition takes place completely in an online 3D environment, connecting both artistic areas through videos, installations and viewer interaction.
10. 10. 2020 - 1. 11. 2020/ exhibition extended to 15. 11. 2020 (opening: friday 9th of October 2020 1 - 7 PM)
Christian Kasners, Susanne Keichel, Tobias Neumann, Andrzej Steinbach, Lina Zacher
curated by: Stephanie Kiwitt, Anna Voswinckel, Tereza Rudolf
Exhibition is a part of Fotograf Festival #10
Accompanying program:
Second Talk: Shifting Perspective
Alžběta Bačíková, Susanne Keichel, Lina Zacher
9. 10. 2020, 5 PM
A conversation on the possibilities of a social documentary practice in contemporary photography and film. With the artists Alžběta Bačíková, Susanne Keichel and Lina Zacher.
Perspective is a question of seeing and taking action. Both of which are directly connected to the experience of space. We now inhabit a living environment and communications space that ask or allow for a multitude of perspectives. In light of this it is possible to again pose the question as to the nature of social documentary photography.
For years Tobias Neumann has been traveling to Lomé and photographing two sisters. He later continued the portrait series with one of the sisters in Leipzig. Though the living environments are very different, his sympathetic vision provides a common element.
In his picture sequence Andrzej Steinbach presents the portrait of a group of three individuals of the same age as an alliance of “shifting identities”. His portrait can be read as the antithesis to contemporary society’s desire for homogenization and clear borders.
In Nová Evropa Christian Kasners turns his attention towards similar questions in the Czech Republic. He reads and registers symbols of consumption, the xenophobic statements of right-wing populist politics, traces of National Socialism and manifestations of the Left and places these pictures in close proximity to one another.
Since 2015 Susanne Keichel has been reflecting on the treatment of refugees in her own surroundings as an object of political and logistical friction and as a xenophobic reaction.
As the product of a film workshop with inmates of a youth detention centre in Madagascar, Lina Zacher’s documentary portrays the living circumstances of this micro society from the perspective of the inmates themselves. To what extent are new spheres of action generated for the prisoners and the artist herself?
26. 9. – 2. 10. 2020 (opening: friday 25th of September 2020 6 PM)
Author: Natálie Podešvová, Jana Stárková and collective
Creative team: Adéla Križovenská, Natálie Matysková, Natálie Podešvová, Jan Poš, Jana Stárková, Veronika Traburová, Jan Vaniš
Performers: Jan Homola, Katarína Hudačková, Adéla Križovenská, Arman Kupelyan, Jana Maroušková, Natálie Podešvová, Jan Poš, Jan Štrachal, Veronika Traburová, Natálie Vacková, Jan Vaniš, Adéla Voldrábová
Dance performance made by HAMU students and their guests led by choreographer Natálie Podešvová.
Due to limited capacity, a reservation is required at e-mail address: effugio@email.cz.
premiere: 25. 9. 19:30
next shows: 30. 9. and 2. 10.
The project consist of the dance performance presented in the AMU Gallery, as well as the multimedia exhibition.
Escape, run away, flee – effugio. Have you ever succeeded to get away from your own mind? Or to win the fight with obsessive-compulsive thoughts? Do you know how does it feel to live in a world where others condemned you for not being able to do that?
Mental discomfort – everyone knows it, everyone deals with it on his own. What is so unbearable in a person’s life that one chooses self-harm as a way to escape mental discomfort?
Self-harm is most common in young people. Intentional physical self-harm is most common in girls between the ages of 13-17. Yer they are not the only ones to solve problems with self-harm, using self-hatred instead of self-love. Where does it come from? Where is the beginning of self-destruction and why is it easier for others to not see these problems?
The Effugio project is a dance installation based on the tradition of physical theater. It tries to reveal the common causes that lead people to this extreme solution. It asks about the triggers and about the relationship with the environment.
This project is created with the support of HAMU and GAMU.
12. 9. – 20. 9. 2020 (opening: friday 11th of September 2020 6 PM)
Exhibitors: Juan David Calderón Ardila, Ranaji Deb, Oskar Helcel, Martin Netočný, Hassan Sarbakhshian, Evgenii Smirnov, Longyu You
curated by: Hynek Alt
graphic design: Matěj Moravec
Diploma exhibition of students of Department of Photography, FAMU, Prague.
What is the mood like in the country?
Last dictator loses his grip.
I just don’t exist.
You trade your health for art.
There are no viruses here.
Extremists try to storm German parliament.
Leave before it’s too late!
Villagers prefer hard work.
NBA players take a real political action.
China hits back.
Share your experiences!
Drone footage reveals scale of damage.
Candidate comes out of hiding.
Zuckerberg blames contractors.
Each day we learn about a new loss.
Turmoil sparks starkly different reactions.
Banksy funds refugee rescue boat.
New York’s not dead.
People turn their basements into secret fantasy worlds.
Unite and heal!
Resign!
The simple present tense is used to express an action that is happening now or regularly. It is the most common form of the verb used. These examples of headlines using simple present tense are taken from today’s issue of the British newspaper The Guardian.
Recognizing signs of the present time lies at the core of an artist’s practice. The constant flow and the unclear distinction of when present emerges from the immediate future only to slip into petrified past a moment later, make this task extremely demanding on one’s attention. All technical images as individual or sequential indexical recordings always capture only what is here and now. That is a quality of technical images that helps us distinguish our memories from our immediate experiences since the time of shadows in caves.
Seven students exhibiting their diploma projects derive their initial experience from photography. Each one’s practice has evolved over time and each one has arrived at utilizing a different medium and an original language of their own. No common theme is treated in the Simple Present Tense exhibition, it is rather shared physical and psychological conditions in which all the works were conceived. A situation of informational overload, insecurity, and extreme change in how we perceive physical reality produced strategies of radical honesty, flexibility, and the necessity for new precision.
29. 8. – 6. 9. 2020 (opening: friday 28th of August 2020 6 PM)
Exhibiting artists: František Fekete, Vendula Guhová, Lucie Ščurková, Veronika Švecová
The graduate exhibition of students of the Center for Audiovisual Studies (FAMU in Prague)
The exhibition’s title Step Aside serves the exhibited artists as a metaphor, one which shows the desire to view the development of our civilization from new angles. This can mean conscious deceleration, comprehending the repercussions of our actions, attempting a sustainable future and the role of the artist within it, or drawing attention to marginalized social groups or phenomena.
František Fekete Auto-Portrait as Doubt video installation
Auto-Portrait as Doubt is a video on the threshold of an essay and a moving collage. The author asks questions regarding the sense of his own work and considers doubt as a vehicle for creativity. Through doubt he interrogates his identity as artist, and the mechanisms and limits of artistic creation. The video is very introspective, but it also comprises of fragments of dialogue with other authors. Through the audio-visual composition of original images, family archives, found material, drawings and texts, he questions the circumstances of its own creation.
Lucie Ščurková The Root of Humanity cycle of photographs, drawings
How would you narrate the creation of the world and the people in it? Would the heroes survive until today? And if yes, how would they fare? The Root of Humanity presents a new mythology with all the integral features. Its heroes, Gaia and Golem, fight developers, cars and normativity, but they are beset by stereotypes at every turn.
Vendula Guhová Enriching the Soil
installation
fertile soil with enough hummus has the ability to retain humidity, absorb CO2, last through bad weather conditions, and of course provide better nutritional value to food. That is why it is necessary to enrich it organically and carefully preserve the life within. One centimeter of soil takes about one hundred years to form, but we often misuse it as if it were a fully renewable resource.
Soil is not just dead rock, but a living mass full of microorganisms, worms, fungi and nutrients. The soil of vast monocultural fields is often damaged by the use of industrial fertilizers and pesticides, not to mention their subsequent draining into the water table and their negative effect on the environment’s ability to regenerate.
The injection of organic matter into the soil has a complex range of effects, as opposed to adding individual chemical elements in the form of industrial fertilizer. We can consider soil much like we consider air – it is a common resource which needs to be protected.
The simplest way for a city dweller to add to the richness of the soil without access to farm fertilizers, green fertilizers or intermediate crops is to throw their coffee grinds or carrot peels into the compost. The intention of the installation is to create a shared gesture, and to show that the issue of soil needs a systemic solution.
There are posters plastered around Malá Strana and local institutions calling for participation in the enrichment of soil – to throw bio-waste into the compost. The gallery visitors can write down what they contributed to the compost. The installation exhibits mental maps assembled by experts focusing on the interconnection of compost and the enrichment of soil in agriculture and their potential use for it. During the exhibition, the author will go to venues and institutions in the locality and try to get their bio-waste. She regularly goes to care for the work, sift it, add to it with her own bio-waste and mix it with soil from a conventional field from the gallery floor. After the exhibition ends, the partly-decomposed compost will be moved to a conventional field at the edge of Prague, thus enriching it. The composter will be moved to a publicly accessible outside space in Malá Strana so that it might continue to serve its purpose.
composter – Štěpán Trefil, graphics – Vendula Guhová, consulting of the project – Tomáš Uhnák, Martin Blažíček, mental maps created by soil experts – Alžběta Randusová (Ministerial Council for Soil, Protection at the Ministry of Agriculture), Soňa Valčíková (consultant for biowaste and composting, Kokoza), Soňa Jonášová (Institute of Circular Economics), Jaroslav Záhora (soil biologist, Mendel University), Barbora Chmelová (ecologist), František Hájek (agronomist, Jarošovice composting plant)
Veronika Švecová The Final Quest of the Real-Playness
Installation
A traumatic adolescence brings a girl to the obsessive and escapist play of video games. The pressing vacuum of helplessness which tyrannizes her everyday life encroaches on her budding imagination. The avatar from her favorite video game fully embodies her parallel identity. A quest for the key gives the girl a chance at escaping from the shadows of her spoiled reality. All it takes is to make it through the final level and to meet the hostile demons, who reflect the deprivation of her teenage experience, face to face.
We are injected into the fragment of the innocent girl’s room and discover the battlefield of the game’s final scene where she becomes transformed into her own gamic idol. May she soon overcome the last obstacles and may her fantastical visions become the landscape of her own dreams.
video Filip Kopecký
Accompanying program:
The Need for Soil Care (panel discussion) – 2nd of September, 6 PM
8. 7. – 23. 8. 2020 (opening: Tuesday 7th of July 2020, 6:00 PM)
Phoebe Berglund (USA), Veronika Čechmánková (CZ), Agnieszka Mastalerz (PL) a Michał Szaranowicz (PL)
curated by: Viktor Čech
exhibition architecture: Matěj Kos
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
Accompanying program:
Analysis of Choreography and Movement (workshop by Hana Polanská Turečková): 21st of July, 4 PM
Lecture effort (lecture by Viktor Čech): 5th of August, 6 PM
Guided tour (by Viktor Čech): 20th of August, 6 PM
The second part of the project dedicated to physical movement, dance and choreography in contemporary art interrogates physical exertion and the act of labor. The will and energy to move is not only connected with a number of functional mechanisms and the fulfillment of an ideal effectiveness in the field of the human body, but is also a landscape which is integrally political, a place of control and resistance, physical effects and their symbolic manifestations. The exhibiting artists meet in a network of structures suspended between these two polarities.
The physical exertions with which we perform any motion have many various aspects and qualities which influence not only their function and results, but also their visual form. As the modernist choreographer Rudolf Laban already showed in his research of motion as a site of work, the connection between a specific quality of our physical exertion, whether we mean the strength we put in, its speed or flow, leads directly to defining certain choreographic forms. The topic of exertion however cannot be discussed only from the vantage point of the human body’s biomechanics. It is closely connected with our will to actively inhabit this world and we cannot imagine performing any activities, much less work, without it.
Any physical exertion is closely connected to the processes of labor/work, their direction, motivation and reflexive relationship to our body. Just like with the focus on choreography, we cannot avoid the question of control, appropriation and objectification of the human body. Many research projects indeed closely studied these circumstances – and not just in the extreme efficiency of Fordism – which led to the incessant repetition of a limited register of movements on the part of the worker and also included visual analyses of motions of labor. The seeming boundary between the world of industrial production and the aesthetics of movement was collapsed in the work of Soviet avant-garde researcher and poet Alexei Gastev, the head of the Moscow Labor Office. His poetry celebrates the synthesis of the worker and the machine, and the visual analyses of work activities constitute a beautiful example of this.
At least since 19th century modernism, labor, its political, social and ethical value has also constituted an important topic for visual art. This exhibition project would like to approach this topic from a specific perspective which melds a choreographic understanding of movement as a form and function with the viewpoint of visual art which examines these aspects in their symbolic and formal representation. The presented work of American choreographer and artist Phoebe Berglund, the Czech artist Veronika Čechmánková and the Polish artists Agnieszka Mastalerz and Michal Szaranowicz focuses on various aspects of the above-mentioned: on the relationship between a physical effort at movement, the social and cultural contexts connected with it and the understanding of the role of our embodiment within this complex webbing.
Phoebe Berglund: Basic Economy vs. Economy vs. Flexible Economy three channell video, 2020, 15 mins
Basic Economy vs. Economy vs. Flexible Economy is a three-channel employee training video that explores the relationship between the flexible body of the worker and flexible economic models. Berglund plays the role of the Sotheby’s office worker, moving through tasks in her office on Wall Street to sleepless nights in a hotel room during a business trip to Shanghai, to her apt in Soho during Covid-19 quarantine. We watch her work, eat, sleep, take taxi rides on highways and dance at night. The videos are narrated by Berglund, who weaves text from human resources websites with fiction and her personal travel diary. Themes that run throughout are social and economic mobility, itinerant lifestyle, aspirational wealth, solitude, cybersex, time and debt.
Phoebe Berglund: Work Poster: Office Stretches three posters, 2020
Cubicle by Phoebe Berglund invites us to imagine a darkened, vacant office in Manhattan. Staff are no longer present, working from home while in quarantine. A laminated chart entitled “Office Stretches” hangs in solitude in an empty cubicle, presenting a range of effective stretching exercises for office workers. These images of the body wait for the workers to return and assume their positions.
Imagine you are the worker. Place one hand softly on the top of your head and cradle your chin with the other. Tilt your neck to the left, guiding it with your hands, until you feel a stretch. Place both hands on the small of your back in the shape of a diamond. Take a deep breath in and look up to the ceiling. Rest your forehead on your keyboard and listen to your heartbeat. Spread your legs, make a phone call. Imagine yourself in another realm. Press your face to the Microsoft Office Window screen and you will see me. I am in your cubicle, you are in your body, we are moving together as one, now, in virtual time and space, dancing till the world ends.
Work Poster: Office Stretches was commissioned by Wendy’s Subway and designed by Simran Ankolkar. The printed poster is available to order from Wendy’s Subway at https://bit.ly/workposters
Veronika Čechmánková: Dialog with The Previous video, 2019, 2:15 mins, installation
In her video performance, Veronika Čechmánková connects two seemingly contrasting worlds. The first is the contemporary culture of the exercising body, nowadays oftentimes connected to trends such a yoga and the search for a mythical integrity and balance between soul and body. The second is the world of our rural great-grandmothers, with their every-day hard work and the all-too literal earning of their daily bread. The ritual of harvest, of working with a scythe, its choreography, is portrayed here as a form of initiation – through the individual exertions towards the final catharsis which takes the form of bread. In some ways, the ideal world of hard work and bread-winning of former village life, connected with the endless repetition of the cycles of human life and nature, melds with contemporary civil reality in which a similar exertion and disciplining of the body in gyms seems more like a simulacrum which covers over the technocratic aspects of our society.
Agnieszka Mastalerz & Michał Szaranowicz: Primary Swarm, 2020 and Sluice, 2018, loop
In Warsaw, on the East bank of the Vistula, across the river from the Museum of Modern Art an investment Port Praski (in English: Prague Harbour) is being realised. Between 1885-2012 the area served as a harbour, which was surrounded by rather poor tenement buildings and a green wasteland, there was a slaughterhouse, too. The ambitious emerging housing development should change the place’s aura for a European-class district. The investment cannot be finished until a water lock is built.
The installation touches upon Port Praski and points out to the sluice’s function – as a mechanism that changes level of something that goes through it.
The installation comprises two videos by Agnieszka Mastalerz and Michał Szaranowicz: Sluice (the anthropometric gate out of hands, 2018) and Primary Swarm (the group of explorers which traverses a cocoon-like space, as well as the black-and-white registration of an unaffected part of today’s Port Praski, 2020).
video by Miroslava Konečná
Hana Polanská Turečková: Choreography and Analysis of Movement (workshop)
In the first half of the 20th century, Rudolf Laban developed an analysis of movement which even today remains unrivalled. There, he also studied workers during labor. He then managed to accurately describe and categorize their every-day gestures and functional movements and integrate them into a systematic study. His analysis of the complex understanding of movement includes the body, effort, shape and space harmony. During our workshop, we will attempt to use the study of effort so that we might see how to perform movement in our everyday lives and how we might be able to expand it into the field of dance expression. Together, as a group, we will then create a choreography inspired by Rudolf Laban’s analysis and we will use this time to have fun and study the question of movement in relation to its quality.
5. 3. – 28. 6. 2020 (opening: Wednesday 4th of March 2020, 6:00 PM)
Janek Rous, Hana Turečková Polanská a Ivan Svoboda, Zuzana Žabková
curated by: Viktor Čech
exhibition architecture: Matěj Kos
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
Accompanying program:
10th of June 2020, 7 PM, Dance as a Metaphor of Thinking? (lecture by Viktor Čech)
17th of June 2020, 6 PM, Ecosystems of Movement and Thinking (panel discussion)
25th of June 2020, 6 PM, Guided tour
Can physical movement be considered a metaphor for our thought? Can we understand it as a method which allows us to relate to thought processes by other than verbal means? The project was constructed around these questions, and connects the exhibition with a series of lectures, screenings and discussions which will be realized in GAMU throughout the upcoming year. Their shared interest lies in the zone where contemporary dance and choreography meets visual and fine art, exploring the relationship of our bodily movement and its structure with various aspects of our reality. The project entitled Choreography of Mind is supposed to offer an initial definition of the whole project, a process through which discourses of contemporary art and dance find their place in their local situations. That is also why the exhibition, which will be realized in the gallery space, is most importantly a platform for live dialogue and is supported by an accompanying program.
The selection of the presented works focuses on a few aspects of the relationship of choreography and bodily movement to contemporary artistic practice in the gallery sphere. While the two exhibited works of the Slovakian artist Zuzana Žabková are a great example of the synthesis between the work of a choreographer and visual artist which use unexpected shifts in the tasks of both these fields, the work created by Hana Polanská specially for the exhibition (in creative collaboration with Ivan Svoboda and a number of other participants) is the outcome of the collaboration between a choreographer, dancer and visual artist reacting to the theoretical discourse pertaining to the exhibition, most importantly the seminal text by Alain Badiou. On the other hand, the fictitious photo-documentary by Janek Rous is an example of one of the situations in which the relationship between physical movement and verbal narration appears simultaneously in the language of contemporary video art.
The accompanying program will consist of a number of events. The first will be a thematic lecture inspired by the essay of Alain Badiou pertaining to the understanding of dance as a metaphor for thought which might tease out the parallels of this relationship among the global works relating to these two fields (Viktor Čech). The second will feature a moderated discussion panel with a group of invited guests, asking about the relationship to physical motion, and the ideology and conceptual framework in the sphere of contemporary art.
video by Miroslava Konečná
Zuzana Žabková: Une elevation arrondi retirée, video, 2010, 1:50 mins.
In this video, the artist has used her experience of working as choreographer as, based of the taxonomy of classical French dance, she wrote a poetic text which, in the Slovakian language, achieved an autonomous literary sense. Dancers dancing on a neutral black background applied it as a formalized expression of dance with its own abstract values. The voice which reads the text replaces the musical component and simultaneously creates a contrast between its lyricism and the concrete technical take on the choreography. As in many of her other works, Žabková developed her complex approach using techniques of the media of choreography in a shifted context which simultaneously explores its boundaries. In this sense, the much more flexible and wider field of visual art serves as a space for realizing her unique artistic discourse which at the same time retains its grounding in the art of dance.
Ballet libretto Une élevation arrondi retirée
I.
Une balancoire entrelacé a la terre
Une glissade a gauche , a droit un deboulé
ecarté
Devant le deboulé un defilé glissé
en dedan sciseaux jeté
a gauche ballon en l air au milieuII.
Enchainement des preparatioin a une grande apotheose
En l air feerie des attitudes elevées
Defilé des aplombs posés
Les demi- caractere relevé
Tourbillon des reverencesIII.
Entré des pas de bouré
Les attitude elevé detourné
Apotheose abaissé
Ballon par terreIV.
Échapé bourré retiré en promenade
Temps de l´ange
Echappé frappé par élevation arrondi
Pas de deux passés changés
en promenade
Les bras assemblésV.
Enchainement des contretemps
Entrée des pistolets
Echappé fouetté
Battement tendu
Battement coupé
Échapé chasé
Cou de pied emboité
en descandant le deboulé échappé demiplié
pas failli
echappé devant le défillé
echappé piqué
les ciseaux ouvert devant le defilé
VI.
Une élevation arrondi retirée derriere
balancoir entrelacé
Feérie des temps lié ua passé effacé
Dégagement d ´équilibre couru
I.
na zemi pohodená prepletená hojdačka
na ľavo kĺzačka, na pravo odľahlý prudký
zjazd
pred zjazdom klzká úžina, v nej pohodené
nožnice
v strede balón vo vzduchuII.
sled príprav
na veľkú oslavu
vo vzduchu čaro vznešených postojov
sprievod hraných sebavedomí, šľachetných polocharakterov
vír poklônIII.
vstup opitých krokov
vznešené postoje obmenené
veľká oslava oslabená
balón na zemiIV.
osamelý opitý unikajúci na prechádzke
čas anjela
unikajúci unesený zaoblenou vznešenosťou
kroky dvoch zmenených minulostí na prechádzke
spojené náručeV.
sled neočakávaných udalostí
vstup pištolí
bičovaný utečenec
napäté bitie
prerušené bitie
hnaný unikajúci
vykĺbený priehlavok, schádzajúc prudký zjazd utečenec zohnutý
krok omylu
unikajúci pred úžinou
bodnutý unikajúci
pred úžinou otvorené nožnice
VI.
zaoblená vznešenosť opustená za
prepletenou hojdačkou
čaro časov minulých pominulo
uvoľnenie známej rovnováhy
Zuzana Žabková: De Profundis,, video, 2012, 4:43 mins.
In this video, the author multiplied the figure of the conductor managing an invisible orchestra. Each of its individualities, which conducts one part of a Psalm written by a different composer, received a “choreography” determined by the moving camera. This creates for not only a poetic visual study of this specific language of movement, but also a special inversion of its paradigm, where that which controls and directs becomes a subject of aesthetic analysis. The author shifts the semantic language of the conductor’s gestures, which are at the same time a demanding aesthetic and expressive form, moving from a type of gestural language towards a combinatorial game with the individual performers’ movement qualities.
Janek Rous: Vysvobození z bytu, kde prach je uchováván z úzkosti a se smyslem pro pořádek (Escape from a Flat where Anxiety Stores Dust with a Sense for Tidiness), video, 2019, 15:53 min.
The fictitious documentary of Janek Rous is not only a verbal narration developed around a real-life story of one unnamed place, but also a visual and gestural expression of a small drama which reflects our recent past, our present and the crisis of values connected with it. The gestures and movements of that anonymous narrator and the movement of the camera are also an interesting example of the relationship between gestures and bodily movement which the narrative fiction applies to it, which creates the basic framework of the resulting artistic message.
Tanec jako metafora pro myšlenku (Dance as a Metaphor for Thought). Alain Badiou, Hana Polanská in collaboration with Ivan Svoboda, 2020, video installation
In her project created specially for this exhibition, the choreographer Hana Polanská, working in collaboration with artist Ivan Svoboda, dancer Zdenka Svíteková and other participants, created a triptych of videos supplemented by a sound recording which develop a creative interdisciplinary dialogue with the already mentioned text of Alain Badiou, entitled Dance as a Metaphor for Thought.
Video I.
She is not even a dancer:
improvisation and text reading: Zdeňka Brungot-Svíteková
text: Alain Badiou, Dance as a Metaphor for Thought (výňatky)
camera: Ivan Svoboda
Video II.
Le Roi danse:
dancer: Jakub Češpivo
camera: Ivan Svoboda
music: Spotify – výběr Jakuba Češpivo
Video III.
Dance:
camera: Ivan Svoboda
music: Jean Babtiste Lully, Le Roi Danse
speech: Zdeńka Brungot-Svíteková, Jakub Češpivo
6. 2. – 16. 2. 2020 (opening: Wednesday 5th of February at 6 PM)
Nikola Klinger, Anežka Horová, Marie- Anna Šulc- Hajšman, Alexandra Sihelská, Aleš Zůbek, Hannah Saleh, Lucie Ščurková, Gabriela Paliová, Jozef Čabo, Veronika Švecová
curated by: Marie Lukáčová, David Kořínek
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The group exhibition Horizont událostí (Event Horizon) presents a selection of contemporary student works of the Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU straddling the boundaries between performance, film and new media. The exhibition builds on the exhibition Horizont událostí I. which took place in Galerie Fotograf.
Gallery AMU presents a selection of the most interesting final works by students of the Department of Photography at FAMU. The compilation of student projects is an intersection of several topics that search much more for questions than answers for specific problems. The installation most often reflects current social topics such as work, money, technology, individuality or emotions.
29. 11. - 20. 12. 2019/ exhibition extended to 5. 1. 2020 (opening: Thursday 28th. November 2019 at 6 PM, Commented tour: Wednesday 18th. December 2019 at 6 PM)
Marie Lukáčová, Matěj Pavlík, Lucie Rosenfeldová
exhibition architecture: Kateřina Kulanová
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
A Composite Portrait of Resisting Images
In the following text, I will attempt to answer the question of how to view the exhibition, or rather how to imagine it as a whole, one which spans a number of rooms and features various works by various authors, and thus resists any holistic form of understanding. A possible starting point might be found in the style of one of the exhibited works – composite portraiture.
This method was developed by the pioneer Francis Galton when he exhibited faces photographed from a certain angle and in identical conditions, so that all the faces included in the group created one unified visage. The “image statistics” thus chose the typical features, while only the specters of traces remained from their individual idiosyncrasies. Galton considered the technology of photography as a materialization of empiricism and naturalism, i.e. something that secures objective understanding through the transparency of its representations. Biometric photography thus served him as a tool for mathematizing biology, sociology and anthropology, which are the sciences which, at least in Galton’s mind, converge in the study of eugenics. They not only provide a theoretical description of phenomena, but also prescribe protocols of social engineering. The mathematization of sciences and, vicariously, the mathematization of the described and proscribed world, fused with the instrumentalization of scientific understanding and knowing in order to foster a supposedly rational sovereignty over the world.
This created the conditions for establishing everything as reducible to information. This process today tends towards more abstract forms of commodification and the financialization of everything. Despite occasional proclamations to the contrary, contemporary art is also part of this political economy. As a form of investment, art constitutes mostly economic value, while the aesthetic value serves only as camouflage for profit-oriented speculation. The autonomy of art, which the Modernist theorists clamored for, remains a false flag for those who are just not in the market for anything at the given moment. Much like information, images are generated from the tension between repetition and novelty, and become units of the libidinal economy. The former distinction between artistic performance as a model of non-alienated work becomes inverted into the dictates of creativity, originality and authenticity which make us subjects both in and for ourselves.
Sigmund Freud, one of the foremost interpreters of modern subjectivity, referenced Galton’s method of composite portraiture in order to focus on of the fundamental features of working with dreams – condensation – through which the dream overlaps various phenomena into a single one. Freud assumed that by means of untangling them, for example by means of tracing their individual and less obvious content, one can find access to the otherwise inaccessible unconscious. The translator Charles Mauron continued in this legacy by also making recourse to composite photography in his formulation of the “psychocritical” method. He used it to help him discover heretofore undisclosed features and relationships in texts, which might stem from the author’s unconscious. By overlapping the texts of the same author, much like in the case of Galton’s photographs, Mauron attempted to uncover obsessive networks of associations or clusters of images. Again, he did not follow the differences, but rather the common features among them, meaning the unintentional patterns of ordering. For our purposes, we should adapt Mauron’s method for our purposes. We do not have to question whether we are really diving into the authors’ unconscious. After all, the physiognomic types which Galton extracted from the photographs of particular faces do not exist in the sense that they show identical, living people. Rather, they assume a working of abstraction which might be understood as a certain type of apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive connections and meanings in unrelated things. Similarly, Mauron’s approach merits rethinking also in the very conception of the unconscious, which might not be directly linked to the question of meaning, but rather to output. All of the (not only) unconscious images could then be understood as potentially useful, whether they might be used in science, medicine, in the methods of administration, surveillance or governance, artistic projects or popular culture.
At the same time, it seems productive to focus not on the unconscious, as Freud described it, but on that which N. Katherine Hayles calls the “cognitive nonconscious,” by which she means cognitive processes distributed across human, non-human, biological and technical systems. If Mauron considered artistic production to be the objectivization of subjective consciousness, revising his approach might yield the insight that creation is at the very least a bi-directional process transpiring between subjects and objects. It is also necessary to speak of images, so that they might not silence us, and it is important to also speak to them in this sense. Not to look at images, but rather with images. And maybe to collectively come up with a way of selling ourselves, in order to pay for ourselves, but to not let ourselves be bought.
9. 10. - 10. 11. 2019 (opening: Tuesday 8th. October 2019 at 6 pm, Commented tour: Saturday 19th. October 2019 at 4 pm)
Zbyněk Baladrán, Kapwani Kiwanga, Violaine Lochu, Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík, Zorka Ságlová, Martin Zet
curated by: Fabienne Bideaud
exhibition concept: Fotograf Festival
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
production: Bubahof
The revolution is a political act of a protest and reform, to which the exhibition presents a meta-idea through mythological and iconic dimensions. These construction forms are more subversive and more personal, but nevertheless this does not detract their enthusiasm for ideological nor identity struggles. On the one hand, it is the question of appropriating reality, which blurs the line between narration and fabulation, real and figurative, and creates a space for shaping the meaning “mythology”; on the other hand, it addresses the question of faith, where a person and / or object embody public disagreement, challenge or duel – an icon. Within the exhibition, artists will present projects inspired by Sun Ra, Patrice Lumumba or Angela Davis, or more collective actions, such as the revival of a Russian revolutionary song; a popular legend performed in the 1970s or an analysis of image material distribution system controlled by the political regime, from the late 1980s to the present.
video Miroslava Konečná
photo Max Vajt
This project was supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Art and Gestor – The Union for the Protection of Authorship.
The exhibition of the students of FAMU’s Department of Photography aims to show some current perspectives on contemporary art’s relation to photography, imagination and social issues.
Can baking bread be a liberating act?
Do you see the same blue I do?
How much money would a hired friend charge for chatting or for going shopping?
Will we ever live on Mars?
Problems, time, human experience and many other basic things have been changing significantly. It is as if today’s world which is overflowing with information, images and (fake) news had no use for protests and activisms. As if it weren’t enough to communicate, especially through social media. As if the era of personalized consumerism, wellness and adrenalin sports left no room for completely banal, everyday experiences.
It feels as if we should return to those basic things – whether that means baking bread, watching the world go by, personal conversation or even art. At least those working in the ever-changing field of art should stop lying to themselves that it is enough, or in fact even possible, to continue as we are.
The questions remain:
What can cooking offer me?
What if I never manage to see blue like you?
What if women make better art than men?
What if it’s you that I’m lacking in my life?
17. 7. - 1. 9. 2019 (opening: Tuesday 16th. July 2019 at 6 p.m., guided tour: Wednesday 17th. July at 6 p.m. )
Rah Eleh (Canada), František Fekete (Czech Republic), Mahmoud Khaled (Egypt), Ayqa Khan (United States), and Joshua Vettivelu (Canada)
curated by: Noor Banghu (Canada)
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
Digitalia is a guest-curated exhibition of multi-media work, deliberating on the use of social media as both an accessible art form and cultural landscape. The exhibition is curated by Noor Bhangu and features work by Rah Eleh (Canada), František Fekete (Czech Republic), Mahmoud Khaled (Egypt), Ayqa Khan (United States), and Joshua Vettivelu (Canada).
This exhibition takes as a possible starting point the concept of “digitalia,” coined by the Canadian film critic, Cameron Bailey, to speak on the convergence of genitalia, marginalia, and wires. Bailey used the concept to interrogate ways in which bodies perform their gender, race, sexuality, and disability through the virtual sphere. “Digitalia,” as a theoretical concept and organizing principle, works to dislodge popular, and accepted, notions of the Internet as a neutral or neutralizing space whose disembodied system is not programmed to recognize embodied difference.
The exhibition will feature multi-media and multi-perspectival work offering various entry points into the question: if the virtual is always allied with disembodiment, what are the options for bodies that think and perform otherwise? By way of inquiry, Digitalia will employ social media sites, primarily generated by user content – Tumblr, Instagram, Youtube, and porn archives – as portals to witness the ways in which embodied subjects embroil themselves into the virtual fabric through their enrolment as active participants.
video by Miroslava Konečná
photo by Světlana Malinová
Partner: Manitoba Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council
20. 6. - 7. 7. 2019 (opening: Wednesday 19th of June 2019 at 7 p.m.)
Daniel Burda, Alexandra Cihanská Machová, František Fekete, Anežka Horová, Tereza Chudáčková, Martin Janoušek, Prokop Jelínek, Gabriela Palijová, Veronika Přistoupilová, Alexandra Sihelská, Andrej Sýkora, Lucie Ščurková, Veronika Švecová, Klára Trsková
The exhibition of graduate Master, Bachelor and Semestral works of Center for Audiovisual Studies (CAS) FAMU.
8. - 16. 6. 2019 (opening: Monday 10th of June 2019 at 6 p.m.)
Niels Erhardsen, Světlana Malinová, Hanna Samoson , Borek Smažinka, Isabella Šimek, Leevi Toija, Jakub Tulinger, Kajetán Tvrdík, Petr Vlček
curated by: Václav Janoščík
graphic design: Niels Erhardsen
I need to be myself I can’t be no one else I’m feeling supersonic Give me gin and tonic You can have it all but how much do you want it? (Oasis)
When Oasis promises us that we can be supersonic fast when we want to be ourselves, maybe it’s not just about fun, about speed of movement and freedom, about a ride. Perhaps it is also about the social pressure we face. We must be increasingly adaptable, creative, flexible and fast. And we must be happy too.
The art can either react conservatively to this social and informational pressure or try to follow the flow of environmental, psychological or technological issues. The I’m Feeling Supersonic exhibition addresses vigorously, at this speed, some of the most important issues of today.
The key relationship to technologies is no longer an object of speculations, fears or naive hope; all of these much rather concern our everyday experience and feelings. Not only do social networks transform interpersonal relationships, including ideas about love (Isabella Šimek) but the technique itself becomes the object of our interest and empathy (Hanna Samoson and her dismantling and assembling of a scanner).
Even more precarious issues, such as addiction to pornography (Kajetán Tvrdík), oppression of women in various cultural contexts (Jakub Tulinger) and, unfortunately, also child abuse (Petr Vlček) are becoming increasingly discussed. Our psychogeography is still defined by consumer culture (Leevi Toija), spectacularity (Niels Erhardsen) but also precisely by that supersonic speed (Světlana Malinová) and the ubiquitous sense of the end of the world (Borek Smažinka).
Art may have once used to pass on values and beauty to us to make the world a more interesting or safer place. Today, on the contrary, it is criticism and mapping of problems, excesses and pressures by which the art tries to make our world at least more understandable and meaningful when we already know it is neither indestructible nor just ours. We can share our troubles when we know that they can’t be easily fixed.
Therapy, rather than art; tarot card interpretation instead of interpretation as such; feelings instead of talent.
3.- 31. 5. 2019 (opening: Thursday 2nd of May 2019 at 6 p.m, guided tour and closing on Friday 31st of May 2019 at 5 p.m.)
Pavel Havrda, Michal Kindernay, Jana Mercogliano
curated by: Tereza Špinková
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The processes and mechanisms of nature and society follow certain rules. But what happens when equilibrium is disturbed? Can small, invisible changes cause chaos? The artists reflect on these questions and exhibit their thoughts in real time within the gallery space.
4.- 21. 4. 2019 (opening: Wednesday 3th April 2019 at 6 p.m., guided tour with listening session: Wednesdy 10th April 2019 at 6 p.m., during Easter closed: Friday 19th - Sunday 21st April 2019.)
curated by: Alexandra Cihanská Machová & Sara Pinheiro
Regardless is an exhibition dedicated to the pioneers of electronic music and sound-art. The exhibition comprises a series of concerts in the opening event and a guided tour with a listening session.
7. 3. - 24. 3. 2019 (opening: Wednesday 6th March 2019 at 6 p.m., guided tour: Friday 22nd March 2019 at 6 p.m.)
Artists: Ivana Pavlíčková, Andrea Pekárková, Vít Svoboda
curated by: Viktor Čech
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The exhibition entitled The Economy of Hearing focuses on the idiosyncrasy of that which we tend to view as the natural state of being – we understand the reception of sound input as pure information bereft of the incessant reminiscence of our everpresent embodiment. The exhibition attempts to frame hearing as a bodily and social phenomenon, one which is furthermore inextricably linked not only to our biological essence and individual self identification, but also to the mechanisms of self-care and the commoditization of the human body.
Hearing is one of the primary senses which allow us to interact and communicate with the surrounding world and is something which most of us regard as a given necessity. Our society is deeply rooted in communicating by means of sound expression, which allows us to mutually interact. Listening to speech or music is however just one of the many tasks which the aural organs accommodate.
Sometimes we forget just how much the perception of sound is inextricably connected with our own bodily presence. The physicality of our being in a three-dimensional world correlates with a ubiquitous soundwave soundscape, as much as it does with our perception of balance, determining the position of the body in relation to gravity. The aural organs also play a seminal role in this case as well. Throughout our lives, we move in a macro-world of acoustic ecosystems and within an economy of mutual information exchange carried by acoustic codes, but we also perceive our own physical presence within them in part due to the aforementioned organs.
This exhibition project is not in any way an attempt to enframe a systematic or educational view on the given problematic. It is rather a dialogue of the curator with three artists whose work manifests its particular aspects. It has also definitely been influenced by the curator’s personal experience, and his own particular handicap which forces him to perceive the specific embodiment of hearing, and the often unequal economy of social interaction based around sound perception.
As part of her project “Recreation / Virtual Wellness” Andrea Pekárková has for a long time been developing the questions of creative therapy for issues connected to contemporary technological civilization and its various forms
of psychic hygiene. Her main expressive medium is based on graphic expression carried by a contemporary digital visuality.
In his endless series of figurative drawings and aquarelles, Vít Svoboda rather takes the path of constantly examining the physicality of artistic expression and its relationship to personal bodily identity. The ear and hearing functions as a recurring motif and constitutes a seminal moment of our bodily experience.
Ivana Pavlíčková’s work straddles the overlap between two seemingly opposite artistic worlds. On the one hand, she works through the physical and implicitly material medium of ceramics, and on the other, she develops a virtual world in 3D computer graphics. Much like in today’s world, however, these two levels constantly overlap, for example in our use of touch screen interfaces. Her work thus incessantly leaks between a sensuous specificity of
the object, and its illusory nature. Here, she reacts to perceiving the ear as an organ connected with the moment of physical contact, its sensuousness and personal hygiene, constantly reminding us that hearing is not just an abstract
process.
1.-17. 2. 2019 (opening: Thursday 31st January 2019 at 6 p.m.)
Daniel Burda, František Fekete, Nina Grúňová, Anežka Horová, Alexandra C. Machová, Petr Pololánik, Veronika Přistoupilová, Veronika Švecová, Klára Trsková
curated by: Martin Blažíček
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The group exhibition project Compassion Fatigue is the outcome of shared conversations, revisions of cultural symptoms, social artifacts, political and economic strategies. It straddles the space between a dystopic discourse and a romantic return to physicality, a new ritualism and the esoteric. Its title references the loss of empathy, compassion fatigue, with which we describe the phenomenon of oversaturation with stressful stimuli which eventually leads to an inability to perceive suffering. This leads to passivity, to a state of rigid and melancholic limbo defined by the emotional and physical experience of inevitable decline. The works exhibited try to reflect this newly-born interzone which stretches between a loss of trust in the system and an increasingly pressing search for personal space between a nebulous present and a non-existent future.
12. – 24. 4. 2018 (opening: April 11 and April 17 at 6 p.m.)
curated by: Sara Pinheiro
WAVEGUIDES is a site-specific and site-responsive sound installation by Donia Jourabchi (BE) and Taufan ter Weel (NL) which facilitates different listening situations to explore our relative sense of space and situatedness. The installation employs the waveguides on-site, such as transmission lines, pipes and ventilation shafts, and works with the acoustic properties of the space at different positions by means of electroacoustic processes – such as transduction or conversion, amplification, transmission and recording. The exhibition opening will be followed by a public lecture by Taufan ter Weel (April 12, 6 p.m.) titled From Inner Ears to Other Spaces. The lecture will explore the notion of auditory and spatio-temporal situatedness in terms of waveguides and transmission media (reaching from inner ear to outer space – interconnecting bodies, machines and environments). It will discuss the relationships between social practices of listening, acoustic or electroacoustic architectures, and different conceptions of space and time. The duo will then lead a workshop which opens the exhibition to collaborations and interventions. These results will be shared with the public on April 17 at 6 p.m. during a second opening.
Program
11. 4. – Exhibition opening part 1 (with performance)
12.–16. 4. – Public lecture From Inner Ears to Other Spaces and the beginning of the workshop
17. 4. – Exhibition opening part 2 (with performance – outcome of the workshop)
22. 4. – Intervention by the live coding group k-o-l-e-k-t-i-v
Donia Jourabchi (BE) is a sound explorer of contextual relations between body and space within the materiality of sound — an experimental approach towards a spatial practice of sound by designing spatial and sonic trategies that can be potential mechanisms of engaging the social within the physical space. She was involved in numerous collaborations, such as sound system design, public interventions, experimental music, dance and choreography, electroacoustic sound techniques and improvisation, sound registration, spatial amplification, installations and compositions, self-made instruments, radiophonic art, and graphic design. Her works question situated knowledges manifested in the physicality of sound, reflecting on the social conditions in the context-dependent and community-based articulation of site-specificity.
Taufan ter Weel (NL) is an architect, sound artist and researcher with an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of sonic practice and socio-spatial research on urban problematics in relation to politico-economic processes. Besides carrying out collaborative and independent projects, he works as guest teacher (2014-present) at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture (Theory Chair), where he also received his master degree in architecture with honorable mention in 2009. He has worked as part-time instructor (2009-2012) and guest teacher (2013-2014) at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (Built Environment department), where he earlier received his Bachelor degree in 2006. Furthermore, he worked as urban researcher (2009-2010) for Cohabitation Strategies in Rotterdam, and was artistic leader (2010-2012) and co-leader (2013-2014) of Blikopener Festival & Productions, a yearly theatre, performance and installation art festival in Delft. He performs live electronic music since 2001 and followed the Institute of Sonology’s one-year course program (2011-2012) at the Royal Conservatoire The Hague.
14. 3. – 6. 4. 2018 (opening: Tuesday, March 13, 2018 at 6 p. m.)
exhibiting artists: Jakub Jansa, Karolína Juříková
curated by: Lumír Nykl
The collaborative exhibition of Jakub Jansa and Karolína Juříková is the second part of a series whose pilot version originated as an invitation to Jansa’s own Club of Opportunities. The bowling bar became the setting for a seminar devoted to the ontology of celery for all the senses.
In this new, narrative episode featuring Karolína Juříková, our intrepid heroes relocate beneath the arched ceilings of GAMU for an initiatory séance of young stalks, their hag watching from backstage, where bodies flagrantly transform with the promise of a new beginning. An old sage rambles from her ritually refurbished throne, her avuncular visage showing signs of new hope. Through the rejuvenated language of folk verbiage, we call for a new spring of shared imagination.
The bleak emptiness of dark background and personal eradication alternates with the promise of collective initiation to the new storyline. A thick tattoo needle and ink blotted in cruciferous texture suggest that ubiquitous anxiety can be smoothed down and moulded into a custom-tailored role. From the freshly-made shape, marked with a new mission, cones an effort to get better prospects for the near future. The librarian or the florist take their part in a shared narrative with the same natural responsibility coming from a story that’s just too real. A story about a class president who has pulled his classmates out of the debris of a shattered school, simply from loyalty to his function. The feeling of elusion of meaning and the separation from a rapid sequence of micro-affairs weighs and presses us down. But in a proper collective tune, it can materialize into a well-fitting uniform.
A ready-to-wear jersey in a game of commonality.
The hybrid war of avatars over meaning suddenly changes, just like that, into a fairy tale of hope, in which new forms of shared attention economy based on mutual unselfish care are being invented.
All of a sudden it’s another smile, it’s another heartbeat, it’s another style of thinking
New hope couture
Folk body modification
Peep-to-peep networking
exhibiting artists: Martin Ježek, Kryštof Pešek, (c) merry, Martin Búřil, Jan Kulka
prologue: Auguste & Louis Lumière, Damien Henry
curated by: Lenka Střeláková
logo: 2046
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The exhibition tracks those contemporary forms of the moving image which consciously make contact with experimental approaches to filmmaking throughout the history of cinema. As a direct outcome of technological processes, the image constitutes a theme for its own contemplation – both on the level of an artwork’s creation and presentation, as well as in the specific steps taken during its remediation and archiving.
Through their concerted work, as well as for reasons of their further (theoretical, curatorial, or pedagogical) efforts, the exhibited authors represent a meticulously crafted and up-to-date understanding of the contemporary moving image. Furthermore, by directly referring to and drawing inspiration from the domain of formal and structural film, they disclose the mechanisms and processes that are usually hidden in a closed circuit between input and output. The relationship between technical means and image thus gets de facto inversed: the recording technology doesn’t as much serve the image; it is the image that gets to be presented as an outcome of certain technological processes when it refers to them by its specific shape.
Based on this set of constellations, BLACK BOX, WHITE HAT examines the moving image’s contemporary situation. It repeatedly draws attention to the pressing question of a ubiquitous modus operandi of today’s digital archival and distribution processes. These have gained a normative mandate. The many allusions to the limits of such processes constitute one of the main thrusts of the event, and the presented works would otherwise linger on the margins of visibility, their existence precarious. Parallel to that – and not only for reasons of the singular theme which addresses the actual end of meaning of recording media within the creative field – the exhibition thematizes the incessant oscillation of existence among various modes of data compression, and the unindexable, performative dimension of the moving image, as well as the role it plays in media and informational literacy and its relation to open source systems and the creative strategies these platforms allow.
The French prologue consciously reproduces the peculiar academic/artistic fetish of the relational problematic of train and film or of the ethos relating to the origins of cinematography. However, it simultaneously constitutes a firm reference point from which to address and ponder the contemporary state of the moving image.
accompanying program: Jan Kulka’s Archeoscope (presentation and screening), Saturday, 20. 1. 2018 at 6:30 p.m.
The publication accompanying BLACK BOX, WHITE HAT exhibition is available in the gallery.
exhibition concept: Michaela Pavlátová & Pavel Rejholec
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
production: Karolína Davidová
CITY CITY is a joint project of students from the departments of animation and sound at Prague’s FAMU. The exhibition presents audio-visual installations, projections and an interactive model of the city which appears in the animated film authored by Filip Blažek. The theme of the exhibition is focused on various creative perspectives on the city, understood as a space to which each being relates both physically and emotionally.
The CITY CITY at GAMU has been made possible by the financial support of FAMU, Filmtalent Zlín, Ministry of Culture Czech Republic and Prague City Hall.
“Melodram” is a site-specific project playing with the authors’ desire to become composers. Their libretto is based on Gallery AMU’s spaces and visitor’s movement within them. The composition is framed by three texts, all to certain extent affecting human lives: Hippocratic Oath, NASA’s press release advocating for the colonization of Mars, and a scientific description of Latimeria chalumnae.
The artist transforms the gallery space into an arena where one can discover life, as well as death. The exhibition is inspired by the Minoan taurokathapsia ceremony – the deadly dances with bulls. Who is the acrobat? Is it the artist or the viewer? When do they enter the mystical game? It is right now or soon. The ritual repetition of the game, one which may never finish shores up the abstract frame of time which the artist often uses in her projects.
Exhibition of BcA./ MgA. student works from the Center for Audiovisual Studies, FAMU, Prague:
Daniel Burda, Alexandra Cihanská Machová, Veronika Dostálová, František Fekete, Nina Grúňová, Vendula Guhová, Anežka Horová, Jakub Jirka, Jakub Krejčí, Adéla Kudlová, Veronika Přistoupilová, Anna Radeva, Luboš Rezler, Tomáš Roček, Andrej Sýkora, Klára Trsková
Accompanying program: “Ochočárna” (collective projection) with Vendula Guhová – June 27th and July 3rd at 5:30 p.m.
Veronika Durbáková, Oskar Helcel, Inka Karčáková, Alexandra Mertová, Zheng Minghui, Martin Netočný
Ferrotype authors:Camille Bonneau, Rony Eranezhath, Hanlu Gong, Anna Jarosz a Elena Semeriková, Petronella Karlsson Aslund, Adam Mička, Eleonora Riabkov, Alexander Rossa, Marie Sieberová, Jakub Svoboda, Natálie Ševčíková, Erika Štěpánková, River Young
curated by: Václav Janoščík
I am looking at a photograph. It might be mine, but it can just as well be yours. I hold it in my hand, or I have come across it on the internet. The more attention and time I devote to it, the more it mesmerizes me and inscribes itself in my memory. It slowly starts becoming all; as if I could leave my own self and enter the photograph. As if I could encounter it.
#elusive
Reality is not just in the here and now, but stretches between the past and the future, between our perspectives which penetrate it and change it. In order to truly comprehend this, in order to be able to visualize it, we need to overcome our singular perspective. We need a sense of orientation and a wider view of the world around us. In a certain sense, we need photography.
#ontological
An encounter is not just a metaphor; it does not have to occur just between people. The first part of the exhibition comprises of art projects which attempt an encounter with things, paintings, materials or memories. Martin Netočný is specifically interested in the connection between the anthropomorphic and the inhuman, the figural and the natural. The photograph thus becomes a form of research, of testing visual and natural shortcuts, clichés, connections, and encounters with signs, shapes or symbols.
#nonhuman
Modern technologies like, for instance, social networks are often ascribed the ability to increase mobility and to expand our communicational potential. At the same time, however, their constant presence and instant content often preclude any more meaningful interpersonal contact. Oskar Helcel has made a functioning Faraday cage – an apparatus which shields its inside from electromagnetic waves. The piece thus exposes its surface in order to enclose space, focusing on its surface to hide the inside. By means of technology, it inverts the interior and the exterior, connectivity and isolation.
#all-too-human
Encounter is predicated on the very uncertainty, or tension, between the familiar and the unknown. An encounter gives the impression of a certain closeness, but it is at the same time predicated on the fact that we do not yet know the other. Connecting photos from the family album with astro-photography, Inka Karčáková fleshes out a figure which represents a relative of hers who is at the same time unreal. František Bernár, a fictitious priest and avid photographer, is introduced to the audience, but remains elusive; we can encounter him, yet he does not really exist.
#fictitious
But let us still suppose that en encounter takes place between real people – between people who live somewhere, have hobbies, characteristics and desires. In her double-channel video, Veronika Durbáková follows the relationship of two friends. She doesn’t, however, adopt a documentary approach, rather deftly noting their masks and fake poses. For instance, the cigarette, the pop songs and the ever-present sense of irony speak volumes; they oscillate on the border of the superficial and the genuine, between kitsch and true sensation; they accelerate and slow down, all the time climbing towards their inevitable, ambivalent finish. The encounter thus does not only take place on the screen – we also discover the connection between the two characters, as well as their relationship with the video’s author and, perhaps, even with ourselves.
#real
An encounter is inherently a bodily experience. We are in a relationship to space and to other bodies, both human and physical. In this sense, we can also understand dance as a form of bodily and material encounter. Alexandra Mertová explores these very possibilities of movement and touch in interpersonal contact. Her double-channel video shows footage of the usual contact of passersby on a street, and juxtaposes it with a dance performance. Fingers, touch, but also the gaze and the passing – these intimate and casual situations and gestures of expression form the robust surface through which we may encounter one another.
#expressive
Much like being, we understand humanity and the encounter as having depth; as something which is discovered and which possesses duration, stability and gravity. But what if an encounter is rather superficial – a flash of a moment? What if there are no encounters in our lives? Can we fill the gap with service? Can we meet in shopping centers? All these questions, becoming ever more important in our hyper-employed society reared on advertisement, are addressed in Zheng Minghui’s installation. The whispering voice emotionally guides us through the story of a paid partner, while the shot tracks the environment of Shenzhen’s shopping centers, where similar encounters take place on a daily basis.
#intimate
After the first room, which presents three installations devoted to encounters of a completely serious, ontological nature, and after three further pieces occupying the middle part of the gallery, which focus on the dynamics of encounter in the general sense of the word, we come to a synthesis of the two perspectives. In the last room, we may observe the ferrotypes of first-year students. They usually approach their main theme – a meeting of two ideal parents – with irony, but address the subject in their own various ways. The students managed to smuggle in the irony and tension of their representation of family and wider society by means of using one of the classical technologies of picture reproduction, one which was popular in the 19th century. The light-hearted content coupled with the very robust material of its medium symbolizes the fictitious but also real presence of the photograph – its potential and its drawbacks, its manipulative and ontological identity.
#robust
Here, the photograph adopts the guise of various encounters, meetings with people and with things. Much like abbreviations, symbols, or hashtags, they create a rhythm, condensing meaning while constantly drawing us in, closer towards the encounter. The photograph oscillates between the fictitious and the real, the expressive and the intimate; the deep and the superficial, the serious and the ephemeral.
13. 5. – 31. 5. 2017 (opening: Friday, May 12th, 2017 at 6 p.m.)
curated by: Sara Pinheiro
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The exhibition “Non-Functioning Functionality” presents recent works by Marloes van Son (NL), an artist dedicated to the construction of sound instruments and electromechanical installations. By means of repurposing ordinary objects, her practice explores natural phenomena and everyday appliances. Straddling the space between the functionality of an object and the emotional response to what it does, the audience can find a cryptic mode of acquaintance which however remains universally accessible.
Non-Functioning Functionality includes the installation “FILTER” and “Devices” project.
The installation “FILTER” invites the audience to examine flexible barriers while exploring the system behind the installation. Increasing the amount of movement from the audience in the space symbolically poses a growing “threat” to the installation. As a defence mechanism, the water will bubble more violently and light will shine brighter. FILTER controls water, sand and air to create alternating moments of light and darkness, and of bubbles and silence.
The “Devices” project combines unexpected and unfamiliar elements with a recognizable everyday interface. The audience is encouraged to explore these experimental sound devices, thus becoming acquainted with their underlying electrical principles.
The exhibition includes a workshop in which the artist will share her know-how, her strategies and her fascination for electronics.
Marloes van Son currently lives and works in Helsinki (FI). Her recent events include a solo-exhibition in the Tekniikan Museo (Helsinki, FI), an artist residency at Titanik (Turku, FI), and a performance in Third Space (FI). She was part of the Supermarket art fair of 2017 (Stockholm, SE). Some of the festivals she has contributed her works to are the DASH festival (FI), ITGWO festival (NL), and the Shiny Toys festival (DE).
exhibition concept: Baruch Gottlieb, Peter Weibel, Siegfried Zielinski
exhibition architecture: Oldřich Morys
graphic design: Jan Slabihoudek
The exhibition “Without Firm Ground: Vilém Flusser and the Arts” at GAMU, Prague presents the life and thoughts of one of the most acclaimed Prague-born intellectuals of the 20th century through the combination of rare documents and artistic collaborations and inspirations. It aspires to weave the threads of Flusser’s private and professional life, marked by various migrations, with those of his thinking and writing through dialogues, influences and collaborations. Following presentations at ZKM Karlsruhe, AdK Berlin and West Den Haag, the next stop of this unique project takes place in Flusser’s native city, adapted and enriched with local ties.
Louis Bec, Epistémologie/ Ethologie Zooflusserienne, 1993, image courtesy of the artist
Vilém Flusser was born in the Bubeneč district of Prague in 1920 and was educated in a middle class Jewish intellectual family. In 1939, after the occupation of the Germans, he fled with his wife-to-be, Edith Barth, first to London, and eventually to Sao Paulo Brazil where he would live for over thirty years. Flusser brought his training in the classics, in Enlightenment Humanist philosophy and literature, to bear on his new environment, revelling in the utopian promise of the radically alien modernity into which he was thrown. Fighting through the despair of the extermination of his family and the horror of the Holocaust, Flusser carved out scintillatingly original, uncompromising philosophical insights into a world of scientific progress, automation and migration. During the 1980s he became one of the most respected philosophical guides of the upcoming electronic era. Even though he died only at the dawn of the Internet age his understanding of networks and communication is every bit as insightful to our contemporary condition as it was then. Through his life, Vilém Flusser sought a new utopian form of thinking, emerging from the crushing disappointment of modernity. He called this “synthetic thinking” using “technical images”. The exhibition will feature, beside biographical trajectories, objects from Flusser’s archive, his typoscripts and positions from artists who knew and loved him, some unique artistic collaborations where he would attempt to enact and elaborate the utopian modes of “synthetic thinking” he described. The selection of artists influenced by Flusser includes renowned personalities of Louis Bec, Michael Bielicky, Fred Forest, Harun Farocki, Joan Fontcuberta, Jiří Hanke, Dieter Jung, Martin Kohout, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Lisa Schmitz, Jiří Skála, among others.
Jiří Hanke, Kladno, Gottwaldovo náměstí, 1989, image courtesy of the artist
An essential part of this exhibition project, the international symposium “Playing against the apparatus. Vilém Flusser’s media and culture philosophy”, will be held on April 7th – 8th, at Goethe-Institut in Prague and Charles University in Prague (Faculty of Arts). We will rework some of the themes in the exhibition: migration, technological change, the crises of writing, causal thinking and the humanist project. We explore Flusser’s utopian proposals for new humanisms and new modes of information and communication for our contemporary condition of rapid technological transformation, playing with and against the apparatus. Join us for a rich and invigorating adventure through the life and work of a Czech pioneer of media thinking and philosophy for our networked age! The exhibition is held in collaboration with the Vilém Flusser Archiv/ Universität der Künste Berlin.
GAMU (Gallery AMU), Malostranské náměstí 12, Praha 1
(entrance from the passage to Tržiště Street)
opening hours Thu – Sun 1pm–7pm
The AMU Gallery’s exhibition program is made possible by the financial support of the Prague City Hall and of the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic.
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GAMU’s exhibition program take place with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and Prague city Hall. Medial partners are Artalk, Artmap and jlbjlt.
Mária Júdová graduated from the Digital Media department of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica and the Center for Audiovisual Studies FAMU. She is interested in the potential of digital technologies, especially in the context of dance and movement performance; she creates audiovisual performances, interactive installations and XR works. She has exhibited at various venues (e.g. Sonar Hong Kong, Japan Media Arts Festival, Cinedans, Berlin Atonal, Sensorium, and others) and has for example collaborated with Rambert Contemporary Dance Company in London or the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media.
open: daily 13-19h
