David Böhm – Jiří Franta Fabulist

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?

Foto Vojtěch Veškrna

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.

 

 

view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna
view to the David Böhm – Jiří Franta: Fabulist exhibition, House of Photography, 2024. Photo by Vojtěch Veškrna

Info

David Böhm – Jiří Franta Fabulist

from: 18. 6. 2024
to: 29. 9. 2024

Curator: Denisa Václavová, cooperation Karla Hlaváčková

press release

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