11 Mar 2008

New projectSPACE in Bratislava

Videoart.cz is an exhibition of Young Czech videoart

Vasil Artamonov / Alexej Klyuykov, Zbynek Baladran, Eva Jiricka,
Eva Kotatkova, Pavla Scerankova, Slava Sobotovicova, Tomas Svoboda

Curator: Juraj Carny

Co-curator: Katarina Uhlirova

Thanks to the co-operation of Flash Art magazine and Prague Biennale in the recent years I have had an outstanding opportunity to meet in person and get closely acquinted with several artists, curators, gallerists, critics as well as reguraly  visited big exhibitions but also young galleries and alternative exhibitional spaces. Thus I could closely get to know the art scene which in the past was always closer to us than any other. My interest as a curator but also as a spectator, was caught by a significant presence of postconceptual strategies in the works of authors like Katerina Seda, Dominik Lang, Tomas Svoboda, Zbynek Baladran etc. Unlike in Slovakia, where in the recent years, we have experienced the deserved return to painting, the Prague artists recur to the heritage of guru of the emerging generation – Jiri Kovanda. His latent presence in the selected works of exhibited artists is indisputable.

Thematically the exhibition videoart.cz focuses on the presentation of socio-spatial interventions, reflections and manipulations. The exhibition presents artists who become observers but also intruders in the natural and often authomatic, even banal, course of the life and things in this world. They do not approach the reality with a piety but create their own, new, sometimes absurd situations. They analyze the social relationships of the spaces which surround us and create for a spectator the specific reflection, remix, new, often more beautiful, almost poetic reality. They play with the relationships personal-public, balance on the edge of permitted – forbidden, doubt our ability of reading what is the fiction and what is non-artistic reality. Due to the limited spatial and technical possibilities the selection of the authors had to be very selective. Thus some of the accomplished authors as well as political activists represented by the groups like Podebal, Rafani and Guma-guar were deliberately omitted. The exhibition focuses above all on the Prague scene, artists from Brno were given the space in a van of the Wandering Gallery / nomadSPACE, which during the opening stood in the Frantiskanske namestie. Considering the media restrictions of the exhibition on video, the selection does not involve above mentioned Katerina Seda who would prioritly belong to the theme of the exhibition, projects of the group Ladvi, Veronika Zapletalova, known for her project Chatarstvi/Cotters life. A series of parallel lectures is therefore focused on the presentation of the activities of students from the laboratory of New Media in Prague, Pilsen and Brno as well as on the wider context of videoart in Czech Republic.

Juraj Carny