David Böhm – Jiří Franta Fabulist 18. 6. 2024 – 29. 9. 2024
Curator: Denisa Václavová, cooperation Karla Hlaváčková
The procedural thinking and processes of creating pictures that you can see in the exhibition of the artistic duo David Böhm and Jiří Franta prepared for the House of Photography are reminiscent of the theory of the uncertainty principle by philosopher and quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg. The schizophrenic nature of the installation, seemingly replicating itself on both floors of the gallery, evokes a sense of blurred vision, double perception and a division of the viewer’s perspectives. However, it also offers a range of familiar and subconscious meanings and questions: What if I see something completely different from others? What is observed and what is imagined? What is experienced and what is real? And if I interconnect all the parts, do I see the whole?
The interconnection and completion of the whole picture is left entirely up to the viewer. The viewer is thus drawn into the shared and playfully experimental world of the artists who are characteristically unafraid to ask difficult questions and leave them unanswered. At the same time, the theme of the double performance was already at its very beginning examined and questioned by methods close to physics experiments, situational randomness and authorial intuition.
At a deeper level of the Fabulist exhibition, another open-ended process takes place: the exploration of one’s own memory, identity and experience through the recall of fragments of memories, ideas, thoughts and sensations from childhood. A narrative of a certain experience that we move away from in our memories, alter it, add to it, and then move closer to it again, perhaps creating a completely different story. In sharing these stories, it becomes clear that no experience is repeatable and that the same thing will never be the same. It appears again and again, differently each time.
David Böhm and Jiří Franta, thanks to their collaboration over many years, often merge into one authorial personality. With their dual approach, they somewhat demonstrate advanced Lacanian “mirror stage” which develops in the Fabulist exhibition in the context of an intuitive artistic mono-dialogue. Here, together with the artists, we are once again confronted with images from an unconscious childhood, and through this encounter, an ancient experience is given a new shape – it is transformed and overlaid with another layer of consciousness. We cannot understand a state, a process or a change when it is actually happening, we can only be in it. Only in retrospect, with critical distance, can the images be pieced together into an intelligible story.
David Böhm and Jiří Franta have been working together since 2006. Their work is varied and wide ranging, from conceptual and procedural drawing, which is perhaps most characteristic of them, to installations in public spaces and performances. Book production is also fundamental for them, and both of them have several original publications under their belts, including comic strip books, magazines and art catalogues, etc. Both David Böhm (1982) and Jiří Franta (1978) graduated from Vladimír Skrepl’s studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. They have won numerous awards for their work and have been nominated for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award three times. David Böhm, together with the poet Ondřej Buddeus, won the Magnesia Litera book award in 2013 for the publication The Head in the Head and in 2020 he won an award as the author of A is for Antarctica. Their publication City for Everyone introduces readers to the urban-development and architectural structure of a city and presents urban-development models of public space. One of their studio installations dealing with situations in a public space was also on display on the facade of the Vzlet cultural centre in Vršovice.
They have received several awards for their literary works:
- Now. Before You Finish Reading This Sentence, 21 Children Will Be Born on Earth – Czech Grand Design finalist as the illustration of the Year; Nomination for the Most Beautiful Book 2023; Child’s Heart Book – V. F. Suk’s Award 2023
- A City for Everyone: DAM Architectural Book Award 2022; Bologna Ragazzi Award, New Horizons 2020; Czech Grand Design Illustration of the Year 2022
- A is for Antarctica: Magnesia Litera 2020; Der Deutsche Jugendliteraturpreis 2019
- How to make a gallery: Bologna Children’s Book Fair 2017.
