Lenka Tyrpeklová’s exhibition project Daily Bread (or Fairy Tales from Prison) presents the environment of prisons in the Czech Republic and gives us a glimpse into the lives of female prisoners. The main symbol that ties the whole exhibition together is bread. Bread replacing women’s faces is their anonymized representative. The real faces of the female prisoners have disappeared during their stay behind bars, each of them finds herself not only without her face but also without her own personality.
Pink Chips and Pink Potatoes, two films in which the filmmaker works with queer identity in a small community. The overarching theme for the exhibition is the complexity of identity. Imaginatively, Juri Charvat grates the pink potato into thin slices, revealing more concrete parts of his own identity. The video collage is composed of alternating footage of real unstaged actions and fictional symbolic scenes, where one can perceive the auto-fictional story of a character who went to a village party.
A cacophony of stories emerging from beneath the earth's surface, told from the perspective of a coal mine seen from the moon. The perspective of the human and non-human actors of Eastern Europe, which the author tries to see not from the perspective of the 18th century Western travelers we know and who have shaped the image of this part of the world for so many years. Inspired by Adam Bobbett's essay "The Spirituality of Coal", Ewelina has spent the last year researching coal mines and the stories associated with them, as well as how deeply coal has penetrated us, powering our electrical reality. Bobbette argues that coal creates the spiritual self of a modern man, and asks this question: How will our modern transition to a post-coal society lead to a reconfiguration of the self?
The entire film is set in the Supreme Court in Prague, which becomes an imaginary stage for exploring the symptoms of contemporary cultural unrest. The courtroom itself symbolizes dynamic spaces that involve strong interpersonal and social dynamics and are characterized by a clear hierarchy of power. The space is occupied by four performers who perform gestures such as whispering, preparing to speak, swearing, or trying unsuccessfully to shift the rigid architecture. The protagonists seem to be both actors and observers, imaginary NPCs stuck in the courtroom, constantly preparing for a speech and a narrative that never happens.
