Curator: Dušan Zahoranský (SK/CZ) Architecture: Jan Pfeiffer (CZ) OPENING: 19:00 PERFORMANCE Group Bouillon: 21:00 * (Tamada – in Georgian culture the "leader of the celebration" - his role is to present the toasts at the table and to create a festive mood; utters a sophisticated, sometimes poetic, funny and quick comments, and is the one who also determines the rhythm of drinking and symbolically ends ceremony at the right moment.) The exhibition attempts to draw partial cartography of rugged landscape in which we are fused. The false images people make up to feel happy, maybe are not so misleading after all. Maybe they are not false in a bad sense - they are just too artfully contrived. Thanks to them we can cope with reality somehow, or at least to hold on more comfortable. Map, into which expected error is knowingly interweaved - sort of irrational coordinates - is somehow closer to reality, which is never so clear, as it seems at first glance. The avant-garde artist believed that his knowledge of and especially participation in the murder of God gave him a demiurgic, magical power over the world, and he was convinced that by thus crossing the boundaries of the world he could discover the laws that govern cosmic and social forces. He would then regenerate himself and the world by mastering these laws like an engineer, halting its decline through artistic techniques that would impart to it a form that was eternal and ideal or at least appropriate to any given moment in history. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 1988 (page 64-65. online source quoted bellow) Unfortunately, even behind proudly erected avant-garde’s black square, filled with lofty visions and pure metaphysics, was bloody stick leaning in the mud. Wife of famous Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze has got to know just a few years after Stalin's death - in 1955 - that her husband was murdered soon after his arrest at the time of cruel Berja’s repression, already in December 15th 1937. For eighteen years, she and her relatives had hoped that the artist is suffering, but at least alive somewhere in the Siberian concentration camps. Boris Pasternak, Listy gruzínským přátelům 1932 - 1960, PASEKA, 2002) Truly the last communist world power, also exhibiting mummified body of his dead creator in the mausoleum, has successfully adopting model of individual self-satisfaction. On one hand China is economically rolling Western Europe while drastically colonizing its own people and landscape. Mass tragic events in Tiananmen Square (4th June 1989) in Beijing has simply never "happened". With approximately 80 million of its members, the CPC is the largest organized political party in the world. Post-socialist Eastern European countries lose annually in bribes and corruption approximately the same amount as a those states spends on its research and development. The free individuality-oriented young democracies on the one hand, taxes all its citizens "fairly" but the gray economy enables some free individuals to plunder these funds. (According to representatives of Industry Associations, the average bribe for state commissions is up to 16%. With an annual volume of around 600 billion in the Czech Republic, bribes from state commissions could range 60 to 96 billion. Annual contribution to the whole University Education in 2011 was 20.6 billion crowns.) What strategy to choose to describe the ever-changing, volatile terrain? One possibility is to try to define everything that is not currently the terrain - to describe its negatives. Another strategy is not to focus on surfaces, but rather on vectors between the rugged social terrain and us - its witness. We are, after all, only the time limited observers of places and events. In the long run, the relationship itself may be a more permanent phenomenon than our passing partial judgments and comments. Affinities, potential roles wait to be fulfilled, its structures and trajectories may be at least information about models of perception we were born into and whether we can actively co-create them. The solution is a kind of inverse perspective that does not build images in front of our eyes, but rather indicates on what basis, rules and principles we call something an image. Artist shown at the exhibition refers to the historical and sociopolitical circumstances they come from. Architecture and its function-dysfunction, cultural models used to maintain and operate creative forces among society and personal criteria based on our very intimate experiences meets in their objects, subtle drawings and installations. Václav Magid and Maya Sumbadze are pointing at the very end of our sublime identity – the skin. Thin layer which is the other pole of an entire universe spread between our inner personal vision and broader socio-cultural environment. Formally their drawings and paintings depict fragments of bodies as molds filled with emotions, opinions and frustrations. Among other more complex text/contextual projects Václav Magid records everyday situations in drawings and written notes. Retroactively assigns reports with legend, which sometimes localize experience or vice versa - localized event is assigned with his personal remarks. Maya Sumbadze draws suggestive miniature figurative shells. Other poles of her sublime imagination are monumental yet minimal forms of utopian symmetrical architecture. Vajiko Chachkhiani and Oldřich Morys are youngest representatives for whom spatial forms and shapes are very basic artistic dictionary. They both deconstruct and construct annoying provoking situations with a potential of collapse encapsulated in it. Chachkhiani also explores materiality of imaginary. He repeatedly intervened into 2D plane of photography with a cut out gesture which on one side undermines our confidence of an image but also points at the necessary ambivalence of picture (presence – non-presence of depicted). Oldřich Morys is a skillful improviser always ready to discover hidden dramatic potential of settled lifeless situations. By joyful interaction he turns up side out meanings and functions of well known objects. He is able to surprise viewer with refreshing viewpoints and therefore he is encouraging us to reevaluate our habits and conventions. Ani Riaboshenko and Guram Tsibakhashvilli write their comment and categorize terms which stand as a bricks behind our factual surroundings. Worlds which we use to depict our intentions and dreams also in a way represent our emotional and moral hierarchies. Both artists further organize into a new schemes and systems. They do mix distinctive well known truths with very personal visions and reasoning’s. Reorganization of a language is – formulation of a kind of new grammar is their actual artistic approach towards photography and installation. Group Bouillon performs hybrid sportive-religious group acts. Physical bodily achievements are mixed with sacrifice and create new and massively accepted form of fetishism. Cult of a young and healthy body pushes out old icons and but because of its alliance with consumption cult, all warned out values such as senescence or wisdom are condemned to oblivion. Spectacularization of banal daily routines definitely weakens our critical awareness toward consumerist way of live. The images simply can´t drag us deeper into the fictional worlds anymore. The environment in which we live has always been a hybrid kind of fiction and facts. But unusual mixture has occurred only in the last twenty-thirty years. Basically, if the place is covered with sufficiently strong telecommunications "signal" you can turn any place into an event. This "event" can be immediately experience by viewers distant in time and space. Even though when the "user" passes through the landscape, he does not perceive only a cluster of surrounding materials and colors. Houses, trees, meadows are to be read like a possible future signs. To open the book, to come out of the temple, to escape from the mausoleum or to barricade the door of the museum, has meant to physically distance someone from the palace of signs. To transform facts into abstraction is now even less a question of proper spatial platform - is more of permanent decision making. Thanks to a technology and our mental abilities we are used to switch between those modes effectively. It is far more an act of decision whether thing I see, I accept as an abstract sign (fiction) or a casual fact. In order to make a proper sign out of something ordinary, it is necessary to find the right referential object. Some delicate and sophisticated "cut-flattening" act might be also needed- to distant sing from its referential object or to underlined important counter value between the signifier and the sign. Creative activity therefore involves ability to dig out the meaningful signs out of chaos - to purify them and orientate in the right direction. And then pass them on for further use or transformation. The less unnecessary energy, more humor and poetry is to be spent, the better. Prague August 2012 - Dušan Zahoranský