Michel Medinger – Lord of Things

#3 min Markéta Kinterová

What is a portfolio review, really? It’s a meeting that often lasts no more than twenty minutes. For some, it’s an unusual format — something between a professional consultation and a kind of informal speed dating. On one side are artists, on the other are professionals from the field: curators, editors, gallerists, offering their attention, experience, and above all, feedback. So how can you make the most of those twenty minutes?

#5 min Markéta Kinterová

We are pleased to introduce four artists nominated for the international FUTURES platform: Ondřej Kubeš, Jakub Tulinger, Miriam Pružincová, and Linda Zhengová. The nominated artists will take part in FUTURES activities, where they will have the opportunity to present their work to an international professional audience, establish new professional connections, and further develop their practice in dialogue with curators, institutions, and fellow artists from across Europe.

#3 min Pavlína Vogelová, Jan Švankmajer

Anything can come to life in Jan Švankmajer's imagination, even meat in love in an ironic mode combining neediness with greed. In the one-minute film sketch Zamilované maso (Meet Love, 1988), the act of two steaks breaking free from the captivity of a large leg of meat comes alive in the directness and imagination of hidden meanings. The two solitaires establish a certain form of attraction and, it seems, intimacy between them. Reciprocally, they probe their brief shared space-time encircled by human conveniences, oblivious to the hostile signals of knives, sharpened forks, graters, pots and red-hot pans. They check themselves out egoistically in a polished spoon while rollicking, wooing and seducing each other. The music from the transistor relaxes the atmosphere, dampens the awareness of a threat. The forbidden release escalates, during dancing and flirting in a dishtowel gown, into an amorous act in a flour duvet, only to have the moment of ecstasy cut short by the direct hit of a fork and the betrayal of a hot frying pan.

#3 min Pavlína Vogelová

The Harun Farocki Institute (HaFI) can be understood as a specific living archive as well as an active research platform for visual artists and art historians and theorists. It is a dynamic environment for analytical thinking within the process of the transformation of image perception, the idea for which was given by Farocki himself (1944–2014) with his specific approach to image communication already in 1976.

#1 min Pavlína Vogelová

#2 min Pavlína Vogelová, Jindřich Štreit, Dalibor Chatrný

In 1996, Dalibor Chatrný realized an exceptional series titled Interpretations of Photographs by Jindřich Štreit. It comprises a selection from Štreit’s systematic photographic documentation of the foothills of the Jeseníky Mountains between the 1960s and 1980s, uncovering the authentic and highly specific existential conditions of the local people. Their lives are lived with a firm sense of belonging to their delineated time-space, which reflects a broad range of social and psychological states in all phases of life. One of the dominant authoritative roles is played by the local priest, who accompanies the locals from their birth to their final fulfillment in life.

#3 min Pavlína Vogelová

Nadar's Literary Humoresques

#5 min Pavlína Vogelová

The imaging of the body and corporeality cannot be normalized. The body itself is the carrier of visual communication, information and mediation, an impulse for comparison and confrontation, and a means of shocking provocation in the reflection of life styles, fates and transformations.