Umelec International
UMELEC Magazine
Borivojova 49, Praha 3, Zizkov, 130 00
(+420) 222 714 574
(+420) 222 710 709
(+420) 222 721 240
umelec@mail.divus.cz
www.divus.cz
Since its inception Umelec International has remained the only international art magazine in English about contemporary visual culture in Central Europe and beyond. The magazine is published in the Czech Republic and every issue comes out in a separate Czech and English language version. Our contributors and readers extend from the heart of Europe through the region and into the rest of the world. In the future Umelec will use this as its starting point. Domestic art happenings are coming into more and more contact with what is happening elsewhere, and the sharpened awareness of these happenings will surely come into confrontation with what is going on outside our borders.
The focus of the magazine will expand into territories that world magazines typically relegate to the periphery. New columns will be more contentious, but at the same time they will bravely infiltrate our environment: Umelec is to refute the lingering dominance of apolitical approaches to art.
Umelec will follow trends, but expose their limitations and create trends of its own. It will leave proper consideration of the appearances of the world to others and with simple calm open itself up to this era of chaos and adversity. This is the only way that the myriad branches of the delta that is visual culture today can come into being.
Umelec will come to you. That’s why the magazine supported and visited the Biennial in Tirana and didn’t support the Biennial in Prague. That’s why in January we explored the art community in Kosovo – look for the write-up in the latest issue. That’s why Umelec spent so much time in and around Germany, so as to put out an issue in 2004 about the German art reality from a different point of view. That’s why Umelec is strengthening its relationship with Slovakia and Central Europe, to become a magazine of cosmopolitan activities in all of their local forms, even if some of the branches of the delta trickle off into nothing.
An issue of Umelec is dedicated to more focused regional or national issues, and always tries to bring to life the current social-cultural situation, including its more marginal aspects. We do not consider culture as a decoration of the state body, but as one of the most important inspiring values of life, even if it is radical or strange. To us, art is not only the world of galleries and curators, but also what is hidden in the ghetto, streets and other apparently abandoned cultural corners. Contemporary art and culture can be a piercing insight from the critical, magical mirror of the world and its future. We are convinced that the contemporary artist is capable of seeing, feeling and hearing things that are normally obscured. It is also a fact that anyone can be an artist, anyone who is willing to overcome every possible obstacle.
The same social processes that cause the stable person in a mature society to lose his sense of reality, force the world of contemporary art to try and discover it once again. The same social processes that cause the moral and political elite to abandon culture, force contemporary culture to politicize and moralize.
And as long as we are able to put it out, you can read about this and more in Umelec International.
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