The Headless Horseman (and liberalism of the 1990s) 24. 6. 2026 – 11. 10. 2026
Curators: Vít Havránek, Sandra Baborovská
The Bezhlavý Jezdec (Headless Horseman) group (also referred to as BJ) was formed in 1996, a symptom of a time of euphoria and uncertainty and the result of a unique encounter of artists with strong personalities. Four young students of the Academy of Fine Arts (Josef Bolf, Ján Mančuška, Jan Šerých and Tomáš Vaněk) entered an art scene that was far more informal than it is today.
They joined the ranks of newly formed groups such as Pondělí (1990), Koza Nostra (1990), Jednotka (1993) and Luxsus (1995), followed by the Ostrava association Kamera Skura (1996) and the group Podebal (1998).
The members of the group were united by a deep interest in neo-avant-garde art, classical literature, science fiction, and D.I.Y., which at that time contrasted sharply with the one-dimensional language of advertising, mainstream pop culture and the imagery of free-market spectacle. Their scepticism towards leadership and efforts at programmatic unification was, as the name of the group suggests, a shared sentiment and may have been the first real common denominator of the collective. Negotiation and intuition, which were integral to the processes of collective self-organisation, replaced a single “head” in everyday decision-making.
At that time, the practice of experiencing cultural diversity in a small collective was based on openness and respect for the gradual refinement of meaning and the creation of forms that were transformed through a process where individual perspectives of the group members confronted and enriched one another. At the same time, life back then was marked by a lack of interest in material things and the economics of work and life. Thirty years later, we should ask ourselves in this context: Is the hope that a democratic approach to creative culture and education in the hands of sovereign citizens will lead to progress in individual, collective and environmental living conditions a lost utopia of the 1990s?
The BJ group exhibition focuses on presenting often unknown, reconstructed or long-unseen collections of works. However, thanks to the lapse of time, it also allows us to trace the connections between the individual works of the protagonists, which escaped notice at the time. The exhibition thus investigates the collage-like rearrangement of images of reality into new maps. The fascination with images displayed on a TV screen, the combination of play and existential gravity, the short half-life of the materials used, the emptiness in the images, bubbles and hatching and the “gaps” in the stories are among the thematic, media and material elements common to their artworks.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication from NAVU Publishing House prepared in collaboration with GHMP, mapping the activities of the art group between 1996 and 2002 through archival materials, photographs and documentation.