Ich/Du
Adéla Svobodová is a graphic designer and an artist. She works mainly in the cultural sector and focuses on graphics of books and catalogues. She works on publications with a wide range of artists (Anna Daučíková, Aleksandra Vajd, Eva Koťátková, Jiří Kovanda, Ján Mančuška, Markéta Othová, Tomáš Vaněk, et al.). She has received many awards for her work. In 2007, she co-founded the Pauline & Adela Studio with Pauline Kerleroux. She also cooperates on many projects with Tereza Hejmová.
Adéla Svobodová graduated from Graphic Design at Brno University of Technology (VUT) and from Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. During her studies, she was on scholarships at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe and at the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Currently, she pursues her doctoral studies at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, focusing on the mutual relationship of graphics and text structure of art publications.
SLO/CZ Aleksandra Vajd (*1971) focuses her art praxis on photography, pushing the limits of the medium. She treats pictures as objects, utilizes spaces, and is interested in the materiality of light. Recently, she has been dealing with reduction photography, exploring the limits of the medium, and stressing the aspect of materiality. The Slovenian artist living in Prague graduated from Photography at the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. She was also on scholarship at the State University of New York at New Paltz. In 2008, she became an Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. She cooperated mostly with the Czech photographer Hynek Alt between 2005 and 2015. Since 2008, she has been the head of the Studio of Fine Arts IV of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague.
RO/SK Anetta Mona Chişa is a visual artist working in sculpture, video, performance and text to make work that explores transforming matter, environments, technologies and their politics and materialities. She is interested in non-hylomorphic models of sculpting and in the potential of matter to transform in time. Her works and collaborative projects have been exhibited widely in numerous institutions across the world, from Art in General New York, n.b.k. Berlin, MoCA Miami, MuMoK Vienna, The Power Plant Toronto, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt to Taipei Biennale, Moscow Biennale and the 54th Venice Biennale among others.
Shifting between photography, video and sculpture. He focuses primarily on researching the photographic image and a post-conceptual approach to the medium. These he develops in spatial installations. Hynek Alt is concerned with forms of perception of the human in the current digital era and the navigation in between physical surroundings and artificially constructed social systems. He often works with the principles of reproduced records or generic objects and situations, questioning their meaning.
Hynek Alt studied photography at FAMU in Prague and completed the Visual Research Lab graduate program at the State University of New York at New Paltz on a Fulbright scholarship. From 2008-2016 Hynek Alt was head of the photography studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, together with Aleksandra Vajd. Since 2017 he is together with Jen Kratochvil head of the Studio of New Aesthetic at FAMU, Prague. His work has been shown at NoD Gallery, Prague, Fotograf Gallery in Prague, House of Art, České Budějovice, Futura Gallery in Prague and Rudolfinum Prague, Škuc Gallery Ljubljana, Slovenia, Plato, Ostrava, National Gallery, Prague, <rotor>, Graz, Galerie Fait, Brno, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Mumok, Vienna, among others.
A curator and art critic, based in the past years in Prague and Vienna, focusing mainly on time-based media and architecture-related, research-based artistic practices. Together with Hynek Alt, Kratochvil leads the Studio of New Aesthetic in the Photography Department at FAMU, Prague. Among other projects, he had co-curated a cycle of exhibitions in the Moving Image Department at the National Gallery Prague; a film programme at Plato, Ostrava; Fotograf Festival 2017, Prague; m3 art in public space festival 2018, Prague; and was also responsible for the film programme at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague called Rudolfinum_Time-based. Besides these long-term projects, he operated as an independent curator. Since 2017 he has co-led the Viennese art space Significant Other with Laura Amann. Kratochvil also regularly contributes to various art magazines and online platforms. Since February 1, 2021, Jen Kratochvil has been the appointed director of Kunsthalle Bratislava, where his field of activity has also moved.
This is not a group exhibition, although it very well could be.
Ich/Du inspects tensions between the poles of artistic collaboration in duos. The two poles which press the entire planet together with a peculiar ecosystem of thinking, expression, and expressing. However, this exhibition does not just reduce the mutual relations of artistic positions into duos. While one can relatively easily distinguish between the specific collaborations of Aleksandra and Adéla, Aleksandra and Anetta, Aleksandra and Hynek, or Aleksandra and Jen at the show, in the end, the particulars yield to the broader whole. The exhibition can be described as a comprehensive work, Gesamtkunstwerk in a modernist sense, but updated, refuting the modernist arrogance and emphasis on an individual artistic spirit while providing space to the search for the most intimate creative blends. What remains is a multiply pervading spatial dialogue. This exhibition is not about binary systems, and, as a result, the planet has five currently observable poles and countless temporarily hidden ones. How gravity works here is food for thought.
An artistic practice as an array of collaborations intertwined and fused into an ensemble of concurrently resonating voices, toying with dissonance at times.
AV, HA, AMC, JK, and AS have been working together for years, expanding and contracting their distance or closeness.
Ich/Du, their collaborative – do not confuse with collective, they are not any such thing – exhibition explores modes of partnership without defined orbits.
The show elaborates and builds on a series of continuous threads of interests and conceptual thinking developed by each group member and AV. All these come together in one site-specific architectural setting growing through the MeetFactory’s exhibition space like an unfinished chemical experiment, continuously growing long after the show itself is long over.
AV & HA open windows through solid concrete, following up on their old project, which brought the storm, rain, or scorching sunshine into a gallery space all those years ago.
AV & AMC explore the history of the medium of photography and give it a new three-dimensional form to elaborate on pathways crossing centuries of thinking about technical images depicting reality and later on abstracting them to the threshold of the monochrome.
AV & JK think of words, sentences, and segments of expression losing traditional semiotic boundaries, relating a simple, generally known story, yet actually negating the possibility of saying anything.
AV & AS challenge the binding, the paper, the cover, the tangible experience of reading, or maybe even writing, or instead recording words in a printed format so familiar, yet getting distant every day.
AV & AS & JK & AMC & HA spread out a series of approaches and attempts to re-evaluate precisely defined and given codes of perception. They do not want to say much. Through the means at hand, they simply struggle to express the inner workings of their worldviews. They actually work. Simple as that. What else do we do, anyhow?
a new iPhone is no more. perfection has been achieved. or rather a certain finality of the technological possibilities of our time, a certain liminal space of invention with what is available, what is at hand, has been reached. completeness. perfection – telos in the ancient Greek sense – the final state.
as defined by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, perfection is threefold; firstly, it is something that is complete and contains all the requisite parts; secondly, it is so good that nothing else can be better; thirdly, it is something that has attained its purpose.
and that, dear friends, is the iPhone.
(or any other high-end phone you personally prefer)
however, we don’t live in ancient Greece. we don’t dress in togas, even though, outside of that that, not much has changed since then. the same lack of equality; the prevailing disparity in different people’s wealth and power; the same trust is being placed into demagogues/so-called public philosophers & charlatans; the same religious fervor;… not sure about sexual identity, that might have been slightly different back then…but the main thing, the thing we are interested in, the obsession with The New that our consumerist society requires, was not there. those toga-clad slave owners were happy with the “state of completeness, goodness & purposefulness” of things. we, however, desire more every single time.
therefore, the news proclaimed that the iPhone is not cool anymore. people on social media are making memes full of complaints about the sameness of the current version of the iPhone to the older one.
this is despite the fact that Apple provided a fabulous new purple color for their device.
and, instead of a 12MP main camera lens (with additional telephoto and ultra-wide lenses) in the case of the previous version, the current one (avoiding the term “new” here, as you might have noticed) offers an unbelievable 48MP main camera lens (plus the same telephoto and ultra-wide ones as last time).
I will leave you some space to process all this information.
good?
ok, photography.
a medium that used to be secondary to art, secondary to highbrow art for a long time, then it became an art form of its own; the limits of what can be shot on camera were reached, so artists started to explore the medium itself, dissecting it to make it a subject of intense critical reevaluation, both in terms of content & form.
now, photography is no more. those who nowadays take photos are people holding iPhones (or any other high-end phone you personally prefer).
some still run around with huge phalluses of lens systems, randomly pointing at things, but that’s just to show off a status symbol, nothing else.
photography is no more, and that’s just so good.
no-one cares. because it is old. and not new. and we don’t live in ancient Greece, where people would have appreciated perfection.
what is the new photography, you might ask? an algorithmically generated image?… or more likely…a meme?
possibly. this peculiar more and more easily graspable format combines the life-long experience and practices of people like Magritte, Duchamp, Baldessari, maybe even Giotto, all the newspaper cartoonists, and quite likely some comic book writers and graffiti people (no women on my list, I know, can’t think of any, history is to be blamed, as am I for lack of research, but as you can clearly see, this is not a research-based text, yet still, I apologize).
but this is not a text about formats that dethroned, executed, buried, and replaced photography, this is a text about photography, and photography is perfect, therefore it is no more (same as the iPhone) – therefore, there is nothing more to write about.
thank you.
(by Jen Kratochvil)