23.10.2024 - 20.12.2024
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Denisa Kujelová
Opening: 23rd October, 7 pm
The artists of the collective exhibition The Other Side of a Photograph share unusual visuality, the consistency of light and the concept of individual photographs that challenge conventions. Selected works by the tandem of Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Marie Kratochvílová and Markéta Othová, in dialogue with Jan Svoboda's personal approach to photography and Jiří Kovanda's subtle interventions, allow us to glimpse, through their shared sensitivity, the hidden reality of the world in unexpected detail.
The selection of analogue, mostly black-and-white photographs seemingly captures what almost all of us see. In many cases, banal and sometimes even unphotogenic situations, often emphasised in a deliberately unprofessional manner to the point of amateur photography, are sometimes embarrassing. However, the mundane in them opens up wide boundaries of beauty that we probably would not have thought of without their help. Susan Sontag descrines it in the chapter The Heroism of Vision: “No one has ever found ugliness through photography. But many have discovered beauty in this way. Except when the camera is used for documentation or as part of a social ritual, what makes people take photographs is a desire to find something beautiful..."[1]
All of the artists, like Jan Svoboda (1934-1990) from the late 1960s, have in various ways transcended the established principles and canons of photography and in their distinctive approach deliberately questioned its supposed message and formal perfection, expanding it with new possibilities of treatment and perception. "The things I do show no artistry. And I want them not to. I want them not to be pretty, to be as ordinary as possible, not to dazzle, not to shock, not to surprise...”[2] Just like Svoboda's work, the works of the mentioned artists have never aspired to conform to standard photographic practices, and like him, some of them have also expressed their opposition to the very term photographer. The theorists Pavel Vančát and Jan Freiberg introduced for their broader thinking and grasp of the medium the fitting tem of "nonphotography"[3] referencing the term anti- or non-photography coined by Nancy Foote in 1976 in relation to postmodern photography.[4]
What makes their photographs so similar is their sophisticated work with technical imperfection, the peculiar tonality of the narrow grey scale and often the use of large formats in sharp contrast to the intimacy and apparent banality of the chosen subjects. Like Svoboda, they focus on their immediate surroundings such as the environment of their homes and the ordinary objects with which we share our private space. In a photograph constructed as an autonomous surface, the role of light in its reflection and absorption is essential, and so is the relationship between objects and their background, with its demarcation often so subtle that the two planes almost merge. This is of course enhanced by the narrow tonality of grey in the choice of black-and-white photography: "Since black-and-white configurations are theoretical, they cannot really exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do exist. They are in fact the images of the conceptions of the theory of optics, which means that they arose from this theory. [...] Therein lies their strange beauty, identical to the beauty of the conceptual universe. This is why many photographers prefer black-and-white photographs as they reveal more clearly the true meaning of photography, i.e. the world of conceptios."[5]
In regard to the legacy of Jan Svoboda and his exceptional sensitivity, the exhibition shows selected photographs from the broader oeuvres of the individual artists in which forms and procedures more or less referring to Svoboda's work can be recognized. Due to the very narrow theme scope of the exhibition concept, images from various cycles and in some cases diptychs have been selected in collaboration with the artists, and it should be noted that their meaning, which was established in the original context through the composition of their units, has been altered for this specific event.
[1] SONTAG, Susan. O fotografii. Brno, Praha a Litomyšl: Barrister & Principal a Paseka, p. 80.
[2] OTHOVÁ, Markéta; CÍSAŘ, Karel; JANÍČKOVÁ, Adéla, a NOVOTNÝ, Michal. Markéta Othová: již brzy. V Praze: Národní galerie, 2022, p. 7.
[3] VANČÁT, Pavel, a FREIBERG, Jan (eds.). Fotografie?? / Photography?? (exh. cat.). Klatovy: Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, 2004.
[4] FOOTE, Nancy. The Anti-Photographers. Artforum, September 1976, year 15, no. 1., pp. 46–54. Also here:
Douglas FOGLE (ed.). The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (exh. cat.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 2003, pp. 24–31.
[5] FLUSSER, Vilém. Za filosofii fotografie. Prague: Fra, 2013, pp. 48–49.
-
Fait Gallery
Božetěchova Street 1 (entrance from Metodějova Street), Brno
23/11 – 13/3/2014
Opening: 21/11/2013 at 7pm
Curators: Denisa Kujelová
This time the selection from the collection is not defined by generations, but by thematic linking of selected works across the generational range of artists represented in the collection, in order to find characteristic features of their work and put it in the context of the development of modern art and it‘s resonances in the present. The central themes are tone and line, icon and character, mutual correlations and contrasts between the different art works, both paradigmatic and syntagmatic. The title of the exhibition "For many different ears" in accordance with the parallel of the position of contemporary art, directly refers to the eponymous essay from a set of theoretical writings Modern Artistic Expression, in which Josef Čapek defends the character of modern art in the contemporary context by an appeal to the viewer's open-mindedness and with his ability of sharp and synthetical perception.
The confrontation of authors from several generations allows for the possibility to revise the established categories and terminology of historically proven practise. The attitudes of the individual authors disagree on many levels, but they are connected by the line of abstraction, conceptual refining of the art work idea and thoughtout use of expressive means. The mind precisely formulating the idea of the art work and a control of all aspects of the artistic production. Although the present art pieces declare their rationality by their intellectual overlap, we can say that all these works are characterized by a high degree of sensitivity. Despite all the noise, it is possible to discover that silence is an important theme of the exhibition. Silence as an aim or origin, or as the beginning of the end. Therefore it is better to speak about the intellect that has the ability to perceive the areas of knowledge, which are on the other hand hardly translated into a structured and semantically unambiguous message by speech. Relationships among the artworks are anticipated with respect to the relative boundaries of defining concepts, the entities of the art pieces themselves and the audience. The present art pieces also consciously work with time, which in this case falls apart and becomes a general and abstract concept, or they assure us about it’s presence and flow by cooperation between visual and audio features. The enthusiasm of forms projecting a vision of the future blends with the retrospection in a melancholic mood.
The title of the exhibition is therefore offered as a kind of metaphor for perception of the art pieces, inseparatebly linked to the context and the viewer's own experience as a multi-layered process, during which the meaning of modern art is created.