The exhibition project Radek Brousil – Date with a Plant develops the artist's long-term exploration of the "politics of time" and loosely follows his realizations from the installations presented in the exhibition Black and White in Photography at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace (GHMP, 2016) to recent projects created in collaboration with the Polish Krupa Gallery in London and Wroclaw. Here, Brousil conceives of time not as a neutral medium but as a socially conditioned norm that structures work, rest and modes of visibility, and thus also determines what and when we are 'allowed' to perceive.

The centrepiece of the first room is a time-lapse sequence of a black surfinia, its velour-dark flowers with a velvety surface absorbing rather than reflecting light. Working in a DIY method in his Vineyard apartment, Brousil used a 1989 Yashica Samurai Z camera in half-frame format (18 × 24 mm) to record the work, then scanned and digitally printed the resulting film onto the surface of glass plates. The sequence of twenty-five images covers a twenty-five-hour timeline, creating a fictional twenty-five-hour day that functions as a deliberate deviation from the 24/7 norm of civilization. At the same time, the twenty-five photographs are irregularly distributed into twelve colour shades - six belonging to the spectrum of day and six to the spectrum of night. The velvety black of the surfinia blossoms and the technology of printing on transparent material remind us then of the impossibility of the visible image under conditions of reproduction.

The second room brings historical context to the theme of the "politics of time". Here, a Czechoslovak one-crown coin from 1968 rotates on a black background. The moment of rotation makes visible the in-between state, that is, a world that is in the process of transforming and tilting, and whose future is ambiguous. The symbolism of a girl planting a lime blossom on the reverse of the coin is here an imaginary analogy for the fragility of the surfinia. At the same time, then, the artist's choice of the 1989 apparatus connects with the coin to two historical landmarks that return to the present in a kind of unsettling loop. The references to 1968 and 1989 here are a subtle reminder that major historical events often take a long time to mature, while their course is often precipitous, and that contemporary transformations of the social and geopolitical order can thus carry a similar logic of sudden ruptures that only in retrospect seem inevitable.

The exhibition Date with a Plant thus shows us that image and time are relations that can be consciously bent, both technically, aesthetically and politically. And it is in this flexibility, between light and dark, between 1968, 1989 and the present, between duration and rupture, that we decide what we see, what we miss, and what time of day our day really is. The added hour here is therefore not an extra, but rather a suggestion of an imaginary corrective space in which everything can be reconsidered and acted upon with an awareness of what has gone before.

Curator: Ján Gajdušek