GHMP Late: Móda & fotografie / for the Bruce Weber: My Education exhibition

Address
GHMP Zvon
Staroměstské nám. 605/13
110 00 Prague 1 – Staré Město
Map

The building is not barrier-free.

Admission

The event is already sold out.

The discussion and screening of Fashion & Photography GHMP will take place on 7 January at the Stone Bell House, where an exhibition of the world’s leading fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who was behind the success of campaigns for brands such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, is taking place.

GHMP Late are carefully curated evening programmes in the Gallery of the City of Prague’s exhibitions. They combine visual art, music and expert discussions to enliven the gallery space.

Schedule

  • 6 pm discussion on contemporary fashion and advertising photography
  • 7.30 pm screening of the documentary The Treasure of His Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo (directed by Bruce Weber) (English version, Czech subtitles)
Bruce Weber (c) Zac Rupprecht

Photo Jan Kolský

Screening of the silent film Faust (1926) with live music by the Nauzea Orchestra / for the Album of Slow Images exhibition

Address
GHMP Zámek Troja
U Trojského zámku 1/4
170 00 Prague 7
Map

Barrier-free entrance: basement and ground floor.

Contacts
Alice Lenská
T (+420) 725 811 936
E vzdelavani@ghmp.cz

Lucie Haškovcová
T (+420) 606 612 987
E edukace@ghmp.cz

Admission

free

Screening of the silent film Faust (1926) with live music by the Nauzea Orchestra.

The Owl’s Made a Nest in the Ruins of the Heart / film by Shadi Harouni

Address
GHMP Zvon
Staroměstské nám. 605/13
110 00 Prague 1 – Staré Město
Map

The building is not barrier-free.

Koncertní sál

Admission

Zdarma

Screening of Shadi Harouni’s film The Owl’s Made a Nest in the Ruins of the Heart is part of an opening of a Artwall Gallery exhibition called Shadi Harouni: Žena. Život. Svoboda. 

Shadi Harouni (b. Hamedan, Iran) is an artist based in New York. Harouni’s practice is situated at the intersections of image, sculpture, text, and folklore. Her research is centered on disavowed histories of dissent, chiefly in her ancestral Kurdistan, connecting quiet personal acts of resistance to global mass movements. Harouni’s work is rooted in spaces, human and nonhuman subjects imbued with both the utopian dreams and broken promises of revolution. Harouni is an educator, Professor and Head of the Studio Art Program at New York University’s Department of Art.

The Owl’s Made a Nest in the Ruins of the Heart

The film, titled The Owl’s Made a Nest in the Ruins of the Heart, produced in Iranian Kurdistan, depicts the interior of a timeworn house, where a cow freely roams about without human intervention. This simple arresting image is accompanied by the voice of a Kurdish dissident, a former occupant of the house, who reflects on the spaces he has occupied throughout his life: from his childhood village home—“like a mythological character, human on top and animal below”—to prison cells once occupied by royal horses, to the featured house whose doors were at some point opened to roaming animals as an act of veiled protest. These accounts, marked by a decidedly ironic humor, are set against the complex and painful histories of global social and political crises, including a growing housing crisis that reflects broken political promises and vanishing hopes of the working classes around the world.

The uprising and protests for women’s rights, dignity and freedom in Iran continue.

Four months have passed since the day Iranian Morality Police arrested 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Zhina Amini for wearing her headscarf “incorrectly”. Three days later, on 16th of September, Zhina was dead. State officials claimed she died of heart failure, a statement that further fueled the sorrow and rage of her family and the protesters who, well aware of the state’s brutal use of the hijab as a tool for the oppression of women, had gathered outside the hospital where Zhina had laid in a coma for days. Since then, Iran has been rocked by the biggest wave of uprisings it has experienced since the 1979 Revolution. Hundreds of demonstrators have been killed; tens of thousands more injured and arrested at protests and abducted from their homes, and dozens sentenced to death. Neither police brutality in suppressing the demonstrations nor a recent wave of executions at the hands of the state have deterred those who, regardless of gender, continue to risk their lives and livelihoods to fight for women’s rights and, by extension, human rights, dignity and freedom for all. Women cut their hair in mourning and protest and burn their headscarves which have come to symbolize repression and unequal rights. “Woman, life, freedom”, a slogan crafted by Kurdish women thinkers and activists, has become the slogan of this feminist, anti-regime, and anti-oppression revolution.

Iranian artist Shadi Harouni’s exhibition Žena . Život . Svoboda, a body of work created specifically for Artwall Gallery, is a tribute to this ongoing struggle for freedom from oppression.

 

Shadi Harouni had an exhibition curated by Jitka Hlaváčková and Zuzana Štefková in Prague City Gallery in 2018.

Screening of the documentary film The Edge of Paradise, (2018)

Address

Municipal Library, Small Hall

Admission

free

The Edge Paradise focuses on the testimonies of the Taylor Camp residents. After the screening, there will be a discussion with the film’s producer and creator of the exhibited photographs, John Wehrheim.

online / Bio-diversity – Oracle

Address
on-line

Bio-diversity is the curated program within the Bio Troja project, where we will for certain period point to selected audiovisual works related to the context of art and ecology. These videos are published with the consent of authors and provided with an accompanying text introduction. The first chapter of four pieces was curated by Miloš Vojtěchovský.

Video Oracle, 2017 můžete shlédnout zde

Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2

The Biosphere 2 Project is a magnificent laboratory for the study of global ecology. This miniature airtight world is sealed on the bottom by a stainless steel liner and on the top by a steel and glass space frame structure. Inside the laboratory is a 850 square mile coral reef, a 450 square mile mangrove marsh, a 1,900 square mile Amazonian rainforest, a 1,300 square mile savannah grassland, a 1,400 square mile fog desert, a 2,500 square mile tropical agriculture system with farm, a human habitat with living quarters, offices, and recreational spaces. Heating and cooling water circulated through the biosphere in independent piping systems, and electrical power was supplied to the Biosphere 2 from a natural gas energy center, located outside Biosphere 2, through airtight penetrations.
https://biosphere2.org/

Oracle is a meditation on the relationship between plants, humans, and technology. Filmed collaboratively by Ben Tong and Alice Wang at Biosphere 2 — a self-contained ecosystem enclosed in a 3.14 acre glass and steel structure, the work defamiliarizes the synthetic structure and the organisms living within it. In the age of the Holocene, the space of Biosphere 2 becomes an allegory for our entanglement with the world.

Despite our technological interventions, we find that it is no longer the case that we can disregard the noumenal world. Forces and substances like CO2, bacteria, UV rays, the weather and viruses exert their own presence. What is at stake is another way of relating to our mediated environment, our place within it, and death. The end, however, might not be as instantly catastrophic as our movies predict. Evil, as Hannah Arendt said, might be more akin to the banal. It is what we see, and what we have become normalized to — in the everyday reports of rising sea levels and destructive weather patterns. Not merely conceptualizing these threats, Oracle seeks to generate an emotional and aesthetic relationship to the world we live in, and to build complex intra-actions within our space.
Alice Wang / Ben Tong

Bringing together physics, geology, astronomy, and ecology with phenomenology, Eastern metaphysics, and the practice of meditation and yoga, visual artist Alice Wang investigates the material consciousness of matter in sculptural form. As someone who grew up between China, Canada, and the U.S., and having lived in Paris, Berlin, Japan, and Taiwan, Wang combines scientific, technological, mythical, and spiritual perspectives to see how matter can be understood to embody existential qualities. Wang chooses materials that convey the sentient universe through sensual, tactile, and metaphoric means, and imagines how the nature of reality can be expressed through the language of sculpture and film. Wang is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor of Arts at NYU Shanghai. She holds a BSc in Computer Science and International Relations from the University of Toronto, BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and MFA from New York University.
http://llllllllllllllllllllll.com
http://www.themagichour.site

Ben Tong is visual artist, born in Toronto in 1981 and currently living and working in Los Angeles. Tong obtained his BSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, BFA in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts in 2010, and MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts in 2012. His practice includes video, photography, and mixed-media installation. Tong’s works have been exhibited at, among others, Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, ltd los angeles, REDCAT, Night Gallery, Commonwealth and Council, Golden Spike Press, and Underground Museum, all in Los Angeles; Capsule Shanghai; Practice, New York; Toronto Images Festival, Toronto; University of California Santa Barbara; and Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. He was an artist-in-residence at SOMA Summer in Mexico City, a Villa Aurora fellow in Berlin, a recipient of a DAAD Academic Research Grant, and a recipient of an Ontario Arts Council Grant.
http://benjamintong.org/

Alice Wang
Alice Wang

online / Bio-diversity – Acoustic Ocean

Address
on-line

Bio-diversity is the curated program within the Bio Troja project, where we will for certain period point to selected audiovisual works related to the context of art and ecology. These videos are published with the consent of authors and provided with an accompanying text introduction. The first chapter of four pieces was curated by Miloš Vojtěchovský.

Please view with headphones, as Acoustic Ocean is also a sound piece.

You can watch the video Acoustic Ocean here

Swiss artist Ursula Biemann captured the airy Arctic landscape on the rocky coast of the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway through the prism of image and sound ecology. The only character in this short feature documentary is a slender female explorer in an orange diver suit. She symbolizes the current feminist concept of the necessity of returning to the entangled world of man and planetary ecosystems, in this case monitored by sophisticated and non-invasive listening techniques.

We are following the Sami singer and performer Sofia Jannok performing the role of a marine biologist who works equipped with a system of sensors – hydrophones, an ornithologist dish and digital devices – to engage in a dialogue with the invisible creatures living below and above the ocean, listening to the sounds being emitted in her headphones. The video soundtrack is extended with audio files from the archive of underwater recordings of ichthyologist Rodney Rountree and the oceanographic collection of the Discovery of Sound in the Sea Institute at the University of Rhode Island.

The volume level of the Arctic sonic environment is influenced by various factors: wind speed and streaming of water, cracking and melting of glaciers, i.e. geophony and rich and mysterious biophony – the sounds arising from the migration and communication of marine fauna. The third factor is Anthropophony – noise accompanying human activities both on land and in the ocean. The latter factor can be considered as the main frame of this video piece: due to the low visibility in the deep cold ocean, sound is the most important medium for animals to communicate and navigate through. Good audibility is essential and more important to the life of most deep-sea animals than sight. The noise as a symptom of the evolving human colonization and exploitation of the planet – apart from the higher temperatures, rising acidity and pollution by microplastics – is one of the core reasons for the ongoing extinction of many species of marine life.

Ursula Biemann
Ursula Biemann

Kid, 1921, 68 min, Charlie Chaplin and the Biomechanical Art of Film

Address
cinema Ponrepo
Bartolomějská 291/11
110 00 Prague 1
Map

Accompanying screening of the film Kid (The Kid), 1921, directed by Charlie Chaplin for the exhibition Devětsil 1920–1931 at the Ponrepo cinema.

Devětsil’s key source of inspiration was popular culture, including American cinema and its stars. Devětsil’s perception of movie stars was very physical, mainly related to the built-up body of Douglas Fairbanks and the sad eyes of the distracted melancholy clown Charlie Chaplin. The sportsman Fairbanks impressed the public by his athletic abilities in genre films, often set in an exotic environment. Chaplin’s films, too, were based on a careful choreography (movements, gestures and facial expressions), although they consisted of a story composed of seemingly random events. The screening will present key works featuring both protagonists – Fairbanks in The Thief of Baghdad and Chaplin in Kid.