Future exhibitions

A place of otherness, of everything and nothing, khora, emerges in the exhibition of Tereza Kalousová and Erika Velická in a form referring to the architecture of Greek temples and theatres turning into deserts, or vice versa. Visions of temples of Asclepius where the sick in the company of snakes dreamt up their healing methods are intertwined with memories of real places of inactivity. Moments of emptiness and contemplation. In the heat. To the roar of cicadas. On a peninsula connected to the mainland only by a narrow strip of mud covered with a thin layer of salt. The puffs of wool caught on thorns and sticks and the rolled-out nests under the twisted branches of low trees evoke the presence of sheep, undetermined in time. Here and there the hot air is stirred by the flapping of insect wings, at other times by a refreshing gust from the sea. Every step causes the scampering of a multitude of locusts and the crackling of grass. A lone narrator composes satyr plays in her head.

As a creative tandem, Věra Lukášová and Markéta Lisá meet for the first time in a joint exhibition project. The result of this collaboration links the specifics of their independent artistic work, which in the case of Věra Lukášová refers to the broadly conceived medium of film, in the case of Markéta Lisá to literature, text and music. What they have in common is a special combination of sensitivity, humility and subtlety.

This year, in the niches of the Galerie Kontext, the outcomes of the series We live in a Society focused on the possibilities of increasing the reach of topics that are quite fundamental for a part of society and yet marginalised. 

Would a public podcast with an academic feat about feminism popularise an emotional and aesthetic-emotional visual companion? Could a lecture on leftist theory be more engaging than lip-sync? Would the spread of neo-Marxist ideas benefit from a 2.5x speed-up?

The culmination of the final part of Watch Whole Physically Free {2023} CZ/SK DABING even with Subtitles (Czech!) without any registration, can be found at Radnickí 4, 60200, Brno, offline and in HD quality, right on our ad-free Galerie Kontext.

In her artistic work, the author deals with the phenomenon of manual labour and its economic and social nuances. This topic is treated in the form of a grotesque rather than a "serious" reflection. The stylised images quote the tradition of cartoon humour and contain references to the aesthetics of socialist realism, both in content and form. The artist's fascination with construction machines and building as a scale model of the world is also characteristic. This interest brings Markéta Soukupová to the environment of real buildings, to bricklayers, cranes or construction containers and the endless building of the city. In the Young Gallery, the artist creates a collapsing cityscape with uninhabited, disassembled units that serve no one, where only building materials are senselessly piled up. There is a sense of elusiveness, eternal change and futility from the dysfunctionality of the city and human labour. "We have to fix it" is a slogan that appears along roads and highways and sidewalks, in places where the road is dug up or, for now, maybe just leaky. But it often disappears before the actual work begins. The installation will be a scenery evoking the backdrop of a puppet theatre, complete with paintings and a mural. The objects play out stories through changing scenes, the wooden skeletons made of waste wood materials bear the signs of being buildings, a city. However, the wooden standing figures in work clothes are calm and do not let themselves be disturbed from " zevling".

Anetta Mona Chisa is one of the most outstanding personalities of Czech, or more precisely Central European, visual art. She uses an extensive register of cultural quotations as well as irony and humour for her work on the border of object making, architecture and design. This artist appears regularly in Czech exhibitions, but mostly in tandem with Aleksandra Vajd or Lucie Tkáčová. For almost ten years, however, the Czech Republic has not encountered a solo exhibition by her, which will change thanks to the TIC Gallery's exhibition plan for 2024. As is typical of this artist, she is preparing a radical transformation of the exhibition display, thus evoking a powerful experience activating the senses and awareness of one's own body. The new environment has an aesthetic seductiveness and a distinctly immersive nature. It is therefore easy to emotionally commit to it. It creates an effective counterbalance to the dominant online world. 

Marie-Anna Šulc tries to search for utopian narratives in dystopian imaginings, thus creating a merging border between dystopia and utopia. She focuses on the question of intersectionality, the experience of bodies and feminist perspectives. The central work of the planned exhibition is the 7-minute video ballad Pelvic Chain, which deals with the theme of the body, its changes or extensions, and the belonging of crip/disabled bodies. The video avoids trauma dumping pathos and reflects on the power of bodily self-determination. In it, the authors draw on their own experience of invasive medical interventions following a serious accident. It thematizes bedriddenness, facing one's grief, traumatic hospital conditions, and care that often transcends violence, juxtaposed with the constant need to fuel oneself with belief in the power of one's body and its healing abilities. Through haunting melancholic imagery and evocative voice-over, Pelvic Chain's video shares the fears and doubts of the healing process and her new identity, and is the centerpiece of the gallery installation. A large screen of the film is accompanied by attributes that extend its environment into the physical gallery space: the stairs are covered by a wheelchair ramp, and a digital dream desert materializes in the room itself.

Since his high school years, Matyáš Zeman has been making music in the field of extreme genres such as Harsh Noise and experimental music in general. In it he searches for different positions of creative avant-garde and ambient mysticism. He has been working on sculpture, drawing and object installations for a long time. Štěpán Brož's closer attention to music is mainly focused on a series of paintings dealing with the relationship between romanticism and black metal. Since the beginning, the inspiration of the genre has been a black thread in his work, which he has been alternately approaching and moving away from. His current research topic is neomedievalism in the context of contemporary art, which is also strongly related to the visual culture of metal. As a creative duo, they will mount a collaborative exhibition exploring the question of whether honesty in life and creative work can alone guide us away from the sins of our time (collective racism, pervasive sexism and depression). Through Štěpán Brož's paintings and Matyáš Zeman's drawings and sculptures, they will create a space exploring the theme of sincerity in artistic creation, drawing on the roots of their inspiration: the black metal subculture and its wider contexts.

eonwoo Chang is an artist based in Dresden, Vienna and Seoul. In her artistic practice she deals with physical and spiritual issues that transcend history, craft, culture and nature. Her recent works show the political context of craft through ceramics.

Ceramics becomes a medium that reflects themes of natural resources, postcolonialism and craft that lead to a discourse of local art and contemporary art in a non-Western context. The Moon Jar project was born out of the impulse to live up to the moniker of a specific type of late 17th century Korean ceramic vessel from the Joseon Dynasty. It is two symmetrical hemispheres smoothly joined at their centre. During the period of Japanese colonialism, this pottery was exported abroad, thus influencing the shape of European ceramics. The specificity of Yenwoo Chang's object is the fact that the glaze of her object is composed of carefully prepared synthetic moon dust. The exhibition project addresses various aspects of the moon as a natural satellite of the Earth, but also as a source of possible territorial acquisition and cultural symbol. The utopian colonization of the lunar surface is contrasted with the pointing out of the symbolic and economic value of artistic artefacts in international museums and the postcolonial debates that accompany them. Beyond these discourses, the material of the ceramic vessel remains clay and its basal character in debates on climate issues.

Central to the collective project is an exploration of Trompe L'oeil, an artistic technique that deceives the viewer's perception through optical illusions. The aim is to bring together the practices of all the participating artists to create an immersive visual experience within the exhibition. The historical context of the Trompe L'oeil technique is intertwined with contemporary elements of interpretation such as those discussed in Norman Klein's exhibition "From the Vatican to Vegas". The exhibition itself will incorporate various components, including an airbrush mural, the incorporation of carved text directly into the surface of the walls, and the strategic placement of flat sculptural elements. These elements interact with each other, whether by overlapping painted surfaces or occupying separate spaces within the exhibition area, to foster a dynamic and thought-provoking environment for viewers to engage in.

The exhibition connects an elemental life-giving element and a powerful symbol preserved for many ages - fire. In the background of the creation of the installation and equally important live actions will be both the photo and video archive of the artists themselves, as well as the collaborative creation of situations associated with prepared scrums of plants, fragrant woods, rattlesnakes and elements washed by ocean waves. The central object will become the hearth as sculptural object, the rising smoke and the many-voiced (or silent) prayer as a means of connecting with ancestors present, future and past in one precious time. A purposeful time-lapse collection of video and photo material of fires from different seasons and gardens, supported by careful drying and gathering of herbs, plants and other found material will give rise to opportunities for gathering over specific scents and themes within the courtyard and the gallery itself. 

Šimon Chovan's exhibition project Almanac of Wounds presents his diploma work. It adheres to a strong material sensibility, combining organic substances such as beeswax and ochre pigment in contrast with inorganic ones such as metal or silicone. She casts, cuts, dissolves and stages her objects into complex, organized wholes that resemble structures and systems of various types: human, natural or artificial. This visual narrative creates a fictional vision in which the present meets the future, the personally acquired (such as the soil and wax from the artist's birthplace) meets the prefabricated. This singular sculptural practice touches on many contemporary themes such as environmentalism, the Anthropocene, the irreversibility of new technologies, and alliances, all of which are relevant to Chovan, but within this project the artist also focuses on the interdisciplinary concept of plasticity as defined by French philosopher Catherine Malabou - as a fundamental operation, a reciprocal overlapping of form between the empirical (or material) and the noetic (or mind); the ability to crystallize form as well as destroy it.

The exhibition project How to (Not) Remember Our Bodies is the outcome of a long-term artistic research on the topic of body memory in the field of reproductive medicine. The exhibition will include a newly produced film by the artist focusing on both the specific individual and collective experiences of reproductive medicine and its historical and political conditioning. It will thus build on the previous film, Uteruses and Brains, which was part of an exhibition at the Kurzor gallery curated by Jan Zálešák in 2022. In contrast to the previous film, the new film will draw on the subjective experiences of women participants in reproductive medicine in the context of Czech and Czechoslovak gynaecology, as well as historical material obtained from the NFA's medical film archive, information gathered from research at the Medical Museum in Prague, and ongoing consultations with experts in the field of bodily memory.

Karolina Raimund (formerly Kohoutková) is an artist, curator and educator whose artistic and pedagogical practice has long focused on body design and performance, addressing feminist and queerness themes.Identitarian issues related to corporeality in her work are complemented by environmentally engaged projects. These levels are interconnected in Karolina's upcoming exhibition, which takes as its starting point an artistic intervention in the landscape that is linked to a specific place, a 3600 m2 farmland in South Moravia, which is still listed as the property of the artist's late great-grandmother. This field is part of one large whole and is thus cultivated in a similar way to the communist regime. The monoculture area is currently made up of smaller plots of land owned by several owners, which are visible only in the drawing on the cadastral map. It is almost as if they did not exist. Karolína decided to remove her great-grandmother's piece of land from this "role", so that her great-grandmother's field would be both a mediator and a pretext for haptic exploration and understanding of the landscape in its former and ideally perhaps future form. The artwork will be based on classical agrarian practice and will thematise the different phases of land care. The project is based on the need to "experience oneself"; to tune in to the life of a great-grandmother. It also stems from the fear that the earth will become even more toxic in the future.It thus builds on the ideas and practice of ecofeminism and highlights the imbalance of human and natural forces. The work will run as a longer term project respecting the natural cycle and will be presented as a sensory exhibition finding partial responses to the character and iconography of the territory through art. Field Revival will be in consultation with a member of staff from the Silva Tarouca Research Institute for Landscape and Ornamental Horticulture, a public research institution.