Amusement Park – a place of sensory overload, glitz, sticky cotton candy, bent plastic, and scaffolding. An artificially created construct of entertainment, unabashed kitsch, and a spectrum of strange simulacra.

A group exhibition by the F2 UMPRUM studio, for which the amusement park served as the starting point for artistic interpretation, will present a diverse range of approaches, from photography, video, and performance recordings to objects and site-specific installations. 

Near Vzlet, the significant Eden amusement park was located in the first half of the 20th century, and it thus became the overarching theme of the entire exhibition at the Rohovka Gallery.

Although in a transformed context, the name “Eden” is fitting for an exhibition about an amusement park—it suggests a utopia, an escape from lived reality, and opens up a new, fantastical world, a literal Eden. Historically, this amusement park was a place of modern entertainment, but it was also where two social worlds collided—the lives of the Vinohrady elite and the criminal elements from the nearby slum in Slatiny.

Today, an amusement park may evoke something entirely different—visual pollution and a barrage of advertisements, familiar from the urban environment, consumerism and bad taste—but its more romantic image might also suggest a return to childhood, the possibility of daydreaming, a rediscovered thirst for adrenaline, a sugar rush.

Curator: Agáta Young Hošnová

Exhibition Architect: Mikuláš Procházka

Graphic Design: Marek Kolouch

F2 Studio, UMPRUM: Eda Babák & Mikuláš Mahr, Radka Čejdíková, Vavřinec Doubek & Jan Cestr (FAMU intern) & Marian Hromek (FUD UJEP), Tim Hanebeck (Erasmus intern), Nathan Mathew Kirkman (VA), Natálie Kubenková (FAMU intern), Maria Michopulu, Šimona Němečková, Emma Lea Nikodýmová, Barbora Nosková (FAMU intern), Jan Merc & Jasmína Živcová, Miriam MIMI Pružincová, Sofiia Shakh, Lukáš Skála, Adéla Spudilová, Vanessa Stefanetti (VA), Monika Sternová, Ondřej Uhlík (in collaboration with Filip Faust, Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice), Sára Zíchová, Tatiana Zvolská

Academic supervision: Alena Kotzmannová, Tomáš Zumr