Autumn 2015 exhibitions
National Gallery in Prague
Staroměstské náměstí 12
110 15 Prague 1
Czech Republic
Veletržní palác (Trade Fair Palace)
Dukelských hrdinů 47
170 00 Prague 7, Holešovice
Czech Republic
www.ngprague.cz
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Silver Lining – 25th Anniversary of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award
September 30, 2015–January 17, 2016
Trade Fair Palace
“A sable cloud turns forth its silver lining on the night.” With such a motto by 17th-century British poet John Milton, the National Gallery in Prague celebrates the 25th anniversary of the famed Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Not a typical group show, but rather an exhibition in close-up, an assemblage of fragments, composed of newly conceived, revisited, or site-specifically applied works by the laureates of Czech Republic’s most distinguished art prize, Silver Lining sets up an array of questions that critically approach the prize’s mechanism of judgment, investigate its sustainability, and highlight its role in the process of writing a recent history of (Czech) contemporary art. Praised by Václav Havel as “a good and virtuous deed,” the Award—an homage to Jindřich Chalupecký, one of the most outstanding minds in Czech art theory and history—has proudly taken the lead in shaping the identity of a young Czech art scene for the last quarter of the century, becoming a platform for confronting the historical perspective, diagnosing the present, and challenging the expectations of the future by redefining the criteria of an aesthetic choice and legitimating a critical evaluation. Silver Lining is neither a memory box nor a hall of fame. It offers a moment of self-reflection, an anatomical cut through a body of an institutional phenomenon. It balances success and failure, heroism and weakness.
Curated by Adam Budak in a collaboration with Jen Kratochvil
Exhibition architecture by Dominik Lang
Moving Image Department, 3rd Chapter: The Owl’s Legacy and Its Discontents
September 30, 2015–January 3, 2016
Trade Fair Palace
Inner Time of Television (2010), the Otolith Group‘s reconfiguring of the French filmmaker Chris Marker‘s 1989 work L’heritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy), lies in the center of the 3rd chapter of Moving Image Department, focused on documentary strategies in contemporary art. Marker’s 13-part television cycle investigates the legacy of ancient Greece through the continuous modulation of video material, voice-over commentary and studio interviews with classicists, filmmakers, dramatists, composers, philosophers and other experts. Described as the French cinema’s “only true essayist,” Marker pioneered documentary strategies that have been influential for a wide range of recent moving image and video, as reflected in the work of such artists as Eric Baudelaire, Duncan Campbell, Christian Jankowski and Lucy Raven. The “research-based” paintings of Maria Loboda, sculptures by Anna Hulačová, as well as the films and architecture of Josef Dabernig and spatial/textual installations by Liam Gillick, each further expand the documentary vocabulary of conceptual and essayist cinema.
3rd chapter of Moving Image Department contributes to Fotograf Festival, which on October 2 organises a discussion forum “Documenting the Present,” focused on documentary strategies in contemporary art and photography. For more information: fotografestival.cz/2015/en/documentary-turn/
Curated by Adam Budak and Jen Kratochvil
Introducing
Renaud Jerez: President’s Lounge
September 30, 2015–January 3, 2016
Trade Fair Palace
Jerez considers understanding the reasons behind the artist’s choices as more important than trying to define the content behind the finished forms. He creates his weird figures in a radically ingenuous way, exchanging the future for the past and using both virtual and real images, as well as naturalistic and abstract forms. His ravaged warriors, rioters and slackers constitute apocalyptic images of the world and metaphoric visions of its future.
Renaud Jerez (born 1982, France) lives and works in Berlin. His work has been most recently presented at the New Museum Triennial, New York.
Introduced by Zuzana Blochová
Poetry Department, Passage#1
Boris Ondreička: The Beginning and the End of the Passage.
September 30, 2015–January 3, 2016
Trade Fair Palace
In Plato’s criticism, poetry forbids a discursive thought—dianoia, the thought that traverses. The poem dwells on the threshold; it is “not a rule-bound crossing, but rather an offering, a lawless proposition.” For “Bifo” Berardi, in a manner at once similar and contrary, poetry is “an excess of language, a hidden resource which enables us to shift from one paradigm to another.”
With Slovak artist Boris Ondreička’s performative “poem in progress,” The Beginning and the End of the Passage, the National Gallery in Prague launches a new series of events whose aim is to emphasize the permanence of poetry and an importance of language. Improvised and spontaneous, it is a revived republic of letters that legitimates the space of words and activates the speech. Here, in the stage-cum-auditorium-like habitat of a blind staircase, the theatrical act of reading, writing and recitation collide. Ondreička’s inaugural, site-specific textual installation is a delirious manifesto of a poetic flâneur, structured by the historical and architectural principle of functionalism. Combining institutional self-criticism and a neo-Dadaist desire for (linguistic) autonomy, it is the artist’s praise of poiesis as a vehicle of world-making.
Performative reading, September 29, 9pm
Curated by Adam Budak and Boris Ondreička
Passage#1 featuring:
Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Language Limit and Excess
Lecture, September 30, 7pm
What happened to poetic language during the century of abstraction? What is happening to the social body? What is happening to the erotic body in the digital age? Finance as a language. The limits of a language and the limits of the world. Poetry as excess. Poetry is the coming back of the body in the space of a financial abstraction.
StartPoint 2015 – Prize for European Art Academy Graduates
September 30–November 1, 2015
Trade Fair Palace
The StartPoint Prize has been mapping out the diploma work of students graduating from European art schools since 2003 and today it is the largest review of its kind. This year, 20 artists from 34 schools in 18 countries have been selected for the final exhibition (amongst them, ZHdK Zürich, HGB Leipzig, AVU Praha, KHB Weißensee, VDA Vilnius, AdBK Wien, ASP Warszawa, UAGE Iaşi, and KHIO Oslo).
The Building of a State: The Representation of Czechoslovakia in Art, Architecture and Design
November 19, 2015–February 7, 2016
Trade Fair Palace
The Story of the Beautiful Leda. A Re-discovered Painting by Joseph Heintz the Elder
October 2, 2015–January 3, 2016
The Kinský Palace Stables
A Sense of Art: Icons of Art at the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts
October 23, 2015–January 10, 2016
Salm Palace
Without Boundaries. Art in the Ore Mountains Region 1250-1550
November 27, 2015–March 28, 2016
Waldstein Riding School