FFU 3

Fotofestival Uničov 3
June 7–30, 2013

_Tell me more about the town you come from. A voice telling a story is more than any photograph.
_(Lyonel Trouillot)

You have just seen an exhibition of the most amateur of things, from photographs through carvings, collages, linocuts, and sculptures all the way to abstract works. The exhibition took place on November 13, 1982. It was intended to foster further creative development among amateurs as well as those not attempting these artistic (if one may call them that) things at all.*
The exhibitions in the park in the 1980s were an expression of pent-up youthful energy. Independent of the town’s official cultural organization, and unburdened by ideas of how things ought to look, they made use of a space open to everyone. During the art workshop on Saturday, June 1, the park will be open to the creative expression of everyone, whether they come with a purpose or are simply passing by.

The third edition of the festival kicks off with four exhibitions on Friday, June 7.
Students Marie Vařeková, Vojtěch Janoušek, and Radim Lisa have invited the young artist Barbora Kleinhamplová to Galerie Dobrý den, where, partly through intermediaries, she will explore the question of debt from both an economic and a spiritual perspective.
The invitation to Malá galerie was accepted by the photographer Kamila Musilová, who works on the border between staged photography and the documentation of her installations, which she ties to specific places.
In the new exhibition space Byt, curator Martin Fišr presents the artist Filip Turek, who, despite his wide-ranging practice, will show photographs from the series V práci, doma, venku (At Work, at Home, Outside).
Vladimír Havlík is preparing the ground for his Saturday performance with an exhibition in one of Uničov’s hair salons.

The Saturday program opens with a talk by Uničov historian Aleš Langer on the postwar development of Uničov, followed by walks through town guided by local figures from the 1980s independent culture scene. Subjective recollection will thus stretch the framework of the official account of the town’s history. A second talk, by Prague art historian Jan Wollner, will address the relationship between photography and memory. Non-exhibition formats such as performance, staged reading, and participatory events will feature Vladimír Havlík and Barbora Klímová, Jiří Ptáček, Pavel Sterec, and Aleš Čermák.

Vladimír Havlík, like Václav Stratil, whose Životopis (Biography) is staged at the photo festival by curator Jiří Ptáček, is closely tied to nearby Olomouc. Václav Stratil was born in Olomouc, and in the 1980s his studio was the center of the unofficial art scene of the time. Vladimír Havlík came to Olomouc to study and stayed. A strong element of looking back is present in their current work. This personal retrospection corresponds to the question of “local memory” that runs through the entire Saturday program. In an excerpt from a book by Lyonel Trouillot published in the latest issue of Labyrint revue, a girl arrives in a small coastal town in Haiti. The invitation to talk that her local guide extends to her is shadowed by doubt – you come with a question, but you may have to answer it yourself. The latest Labyrint is devoted to the theme of forgetting; the photo festival, to the question of memory. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. (Elizabeth Bishop)

(Blanka Švédová, Petr Willert)

* commemorative print for the first exhibition

–
PROGRAM
May 31 / June 1
workshop:
Friday – talk / Byt, 15:00
Saturday – work / park from 10:00, opening at 15:00
https://www.facebook.com/events/124407551097236

June 7
exhibition openings:
Vladimír Havlík, Vlasy (Hair) / Kadeřnictví, 17:30
Barbora Kleinhamplová, Neviditelná ruka (The Invisible Hand) / Galerie Dobrý den, 18:00
Kamila Musilová, Jezevčík (Dachshund) / Malá Galerie, 20:00
Filip Turek, Přípravný prostor (Preparation Space) / Byt, 20:30

June 8
Aleš Langer, Uničov mezi květnem a listopadem (Uničov Between May and November) – talk / Muzeum baroka, 10:00
Ladislav Ondráček, Antonín and Radek Mikšík (PhotoPark4) – town guides / Muzeum baroka, 11:00
Vladimír Havlík, Na hnědo (Dyed Brown) – performance / Kadeřnictví Kristina Čáslavová, 11:00
Pavel Sterec, Dvojice pozorovaná z takové dálky, aby to podstatné zůstalo skryto (A Couple Observed from Such a Distance That the Essential Remains Hidden) – performance / Malá galerie, 15:00
Jan Wollner, Fotografie a paměť (Photography and Memory) – talk / Muzeum baroka, 17:00
– Photography played a key role in the constitution of art history as an independent discipline, gathering disparate artifacts, distant in time and space, into a single place: a grand pictorial narrative, an imaginary museum, or a lecture hall. In capturing the unofficial art of the postwar Eastern Bloc, however, it largely failed, because many important events there did not take place in the ordinary sense of the word. They were not supported by an official institution, nor framed in a specific space and time. Often they unfolded only ephemerally in the minds of their protagonists and left nothing that could become the target of a camera, yet they did not lose their essential significance. Can memory stand in for photography in reconstructing them? –
Jiří Ptáček, Václav Stratil: Životopis (Biography) – staged reading, Barbora Zentková and Julia Grybos, Hana Brázdilová and Blanka Švédová, Kunhuta Válová djs / Restaurace Na Střelnici, 20:00

June 9
Mass for the Forgiveness of Debt / Kostel Nanebevzetí Panny Marie, 8:00

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Vladimír Havlík, Vlasy / Kadeřnictví Kristina Čáslavová
The Olomouc artist Vladimír Havlík (b. 1959) has taken part in every edition of the festival. At the first, within Jan Freiberg’s curatorial project Sad (Orchard), he realized Jako strom (Like a Tree), an action he had conceived long before; at the second, he sang with his band Ostrý zub. The big-beat evening (Křečový žíly revival, Ostrý zub) at Na Čtverce referred to the strong generational group of “máničky” (long-haired nonconformist youth) active in Uničov in the 1980s. This year, with an exhibition of photo documentation of selected earlier actions chosen specifically for the occasion, Havlík prepared the ground for a new Saturday performance. As Barbora Klímová puts it: “hair brought all sorts of things together.”

Barbora Kleinhamplová, Neviditelná ruka / Galerie Dobrý den
The title of the exhibition, Neviditelná ruka (The Invisible Hand), has several layers. Economists speak of the invisible hand of the market. From a spiritual point of view, we can understand it as divine providence: God guides everything with an invisible hand toward the common good.
And yet another prime mover is the artist herself and her invisible hand, which directs this exhibition. The first part of the exhibition takes place at Galerie Dobrý den, in the form of a talk by Ing. Jiří Klvač, CSc.; the next on Sunday at eight in the morning, when parish priest Josef Janek will celebrate a Mass for the forgiveness of debts at Kostel Nanebevzetí Panny Marie.
Let us now recall what Smith was after when he wrote his seminal work. The book was meant above all as an attempt to establish economics as a science. The economy was now to have its own field of inquiry, which we today call “economics,” however strange that must have sounded in Smith’s day, and it was even to be governed by laws similar to those that Sir Isaac Newton had then described as the laws governing the workings of the world. Newton portrayed God as a cosmic clockmaker who had built the machinery of the cosmos to work for the benefit of humankind. God then left the world running without further intervention. Smith attempted a similar, Newtonian argument. God, or divine providence, as he put it, had arranged things so that our efforts to satisfy our own interests are, in an unrestricted market, led “as if by an invisible hand” to the common good. This invisible hand is an instrument of divine providence, as Smith writes in his book Theory of Moral Sentiments. Literally, the hand of God. (David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
(Marie Vařeková)

Kamila Musilová, Jezevčík / Malá galerie
In the exhibition Jezevčík (Dachshund), Kamila Musilová (b. 1983) explores themes of nostalgia, DIY tinkering, folk culture, and the Czech passion for dogs. The artist has been engaged with these rural and family themes for some time. She examines how different generations relate to the visual forms of homemade creativity and kitsch.
Her starting point was her thesis project Dědeček a Babička (Grandpa and Grandma), in which she used photography to create an unconventional portrait of her grandparents. The photographs show installations the artist assembled in their apartment from furniture and personal belongings. In her work, she further depersonalizes and generalizes this rather intimate subject. In the Jezevčík exhibition, various media – photography, do-it-yourself objects, and installation – intertwine and complement one another.

Filip Turek, Přípravná místnost (Preparation Room) / Byt
On the occasion of Filip Turek’s (b. 1968) first major solo exhibition, Kryptonormal, essentially a retrospective, held at tranzitdisplay gallery in the fall of 2008, the exhibition’s curator Tomáš Pospiszyl wrote of him: “Filip Turek is one of the most original, but also one of the least known figures of Czech visual art of the past two decades.” Although the exhibition did not go unnoticed, this role of a (rather half-forgotten) legend has stayed with him. Filip Turek certainly does not suffer from overproduction, nor does he feel the need to push his way into all sorts of galleries. Not only for this reason, of course, encountering his works on gallery ground is unlikely to become an everyday affair any time soon. In recent years, his standing on the domestic art scene was confirmed, and perhaps even somewhat raised, by his participation in the exhibition Ostrovy odporu (Islands of Resistance) at the National Gallery. Also significant is the interest of the younger generation, which has translated into several solo exhibitions at galleries such as AM 180, etc.galerie, Galerie Ferdinanda Baumanna, and, last but not least, the invitation to this year’s Fotofestival Uničov.
Turek belongs to the generation that was the first in this country able to work freely with installations and objects. He made the most of it. From the very beginning, his work has been accompanied by mystification, unsettling, ambiguity, provocation, sexuality, and above all playfulness and a sense of humor. Whether he ends up bringing found photographs to Uničov or photographs of found still lifes, we can certainly expect not to be bored at Byt.
(Martin Fišr)

Aleš Langer, Ladislav Ondráček, PhotoPark4, Vladimír Havlík, Pavel Sterec, Jan Wollner, Jiří Ptáček, Barbora Zentková and Julia Grybos, Hana Brázdilová and Blanka Švédová, Kunhuta Válová / Saturday
Relating to what one has not lived through, and resisting the sentiment that accompanies it, are the personal motives of the Saturday program. It could happen anytime and anywhere. In Uničov in the 1980s, at Na Čtverce, sharing the passage of time together meant something to a group of young people. These independent cultural activities remained inscribed in memory in ever-widening circles, reaching even the children who were not yet in first grade at the time. Nora’s contagion frightens the living. – The acceleration of history. We need to realize what this expression means exactly, and not only as a metaphor: an ever faster slipping into a past that is definitively dead, the general perception of everything as having vanished – a disruption of equilibrium. The tearing away of what still remained alive in the warmth of tradition, in the muteness of habit, in the repetition of what we inherited from our ancestors, under the pressure of a deep feeling for history. The acquiring of self-awareness under the sign of the past, the completing of something that has always already begun. We speak so much about memory only because there is none left. (Pierre Nora) – The opening talk by Aleš Langer on the town’s postwar history, the walk that follows with “witnesses” of Uničov’s 1980s, Ladislav Ondráček and Antonín Mikšík, a member of the group PhotoPark4, and the talk by Prague art historian Jan Wollner together mark out the space of a temporary “site of memory.” The invitation of Vladimír Havlík and Barbora Klímová, and of Václav Stratil with Jiří Ptáček, retrospectively evokes the semblance of past connections. Havlík and Stratil are figures closely tied to nearby Olomouc. Václav Stratil was born in Olomouc, and in the 1980s his studio was the center of the unofficial art scene of the time. Vladimír Havlík came to Olomouc to study and stayed. The strong retrospective tension in their current work is realized through collaboration. Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics is a code through which the work of Pavel Sterec can also be viewed. Through distinctive models of collaboration, he expands the field of art into the areas of his other interests. The boundary between the creative contributions of those involved is not the point. I am writing it down for history – Hana Brázdilová and Michaela Adamusová participate in Pavel Sterec’s action, while Václav Stratil’s Životopis will be read by Radka Vařeková, Marie Vařeková, Blanka Švédová, Jiří Ptáček, and Stanislav Vlč. Bourriaud’s heightened sense of the present offers far firmer footholds than acts of recollection. The cracks in everyday life are not a deep fragility but a place of mutuality, and the delicacy of literary associations is the authorial narrative of this boldly composed Saturday program. Bourriaud’s description of how the contemporary artist can work with reality by selecting from, and reusing, an already existing network of signs and meanings is well matched by the metaphor of the DJ.
(Blanka Švédová)

Festival venues:
Galerie Dobrý den, Gymnázium Uničov (Mon–Fri 7:30–15:00)
Malá galerie, Bří Čapků 690 (open on request, ring the bell marked “Malá”)
Kadeřnictví Kristina Čáslavová, Staškova 242 (Mon, Wed, Fri 8:00–12:00; Tue, Thu 14:00–18:00)
Byt, Opletalova 687 (bell marked “Lev”)
Muzeum baroka, Kostelní nám. 153
Restaurace Na Střelnici, park

www.facebook.com/fotofestivalunicov
www.facebook.com/galeriedobryden
www.galeriedobryden.tumblr.com

Thanks to:
Town of Uničov, Ovoce zelenina Rosema, Řeznictví Kupka, ArtMap