Saša Spačal: MycoMythologies

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

Barrier-free entrance: basement and ground floor.

The exhibition takes place in a former cafe

Open
Tue-Thu 10 am – 6 pm
Fri 1–6 pm
Sat-Sun 10 am – 6 pm

free with a valid ticket to the Troja Château

Prague City Gallery’s program Biotroja in collaboration with Prague City University present artist Saša Spačal.

MycoMythologies Patterning Saša Spačal. Photo Marthe Vos

In her immersive meditative biotechnological landscape of MycoMythologies, Spačal considers what the world of fungus could offer in terms of changes in the way we live. The information captured from the microscopic images of the mycelium is transformed by software processes into several interconnected screens and sound generative composition. MycoMythological artistic research explores how mushrooms and their underground networks could inform human species about behavioral practices of a deeper inclusion and caring.

This biotechnological installation consists of two parts – MycoMythologies: Rupture and MycoMythologies: Patterning and together, they represent two nodes of a currently dysfunctional mythological planetary institution – World Networks Entanglement. Mycocentric network in the installation MycoMythologies: Rupture indicates situations that could improve the present crisis. MycoMythologies: Patterning is an infrastructural node where the artist has used her own blood, sweat and tears as a catalyst for a dialogue with the mushroom ecosystem and draws sonified cartographies for the Atlas of Collaborative Contamination.

Planetary life is biotechnologically connected and stacked. In the underground flows of mycelial growth, in one of the infrastructures of the World Networks Entanglement several voices start uttering an urgent need: “We can’t return to normal because the normal that we had was precisely the problem.” As it is an act of multiplicity, the vocal gestures changes looping mythologies in the informational Flow of the mycoscopic node.

In another part of the Entanglement a prototype draft for acquiring a permit for a new node in the networks is being written by a healer patternist: “The infrastructural node in the World Networks Entanglement provides an epigenetic environment for the Hericium erinaceus mushroom. As an offering human healer patternist, Hericium donated her blood, sweat and tears to braid contamination, dosing it slowly into a fungal environment. Not to shock, but nurture, negotiate and form xeno-patterns in the central pattern of the Entanglement Flow. Contamination always eludes control and so does the node in question; however, there is a wish to include and collaborate. A wish that was built in the node to produce cartographies of contamination collaboration with an integrated mapping device: collecting micrographs of contamination, charting maps and building an ever evolving and transforming Atlas of Collaborative Contamination. All this to outline relations, to allow the stories of multiplicities to emerge, to develop caring methods of connecting and entangling, to finally be able to navigate patterns of intra- and inter-species complexities.”

Bio
Saša Spačal (SI) researches living systems at the intersection of contemporary and sound art. Her work focuses on entanglements of environment-culture continuum and planetary metabolisms by developing interfaces and relations with soil critters. She addresses the posthuman condition, which involves mechanical, digital and organic logic within biopolitics and necropolitics.

Her works were exhibited at venues such as Ars Electronica Festival (AT), National Art Museum of China (CHN), Perm Museum of Contemporary Art (RUS), Centre for Contemporary Art Barcelona (SP), Prix Cube (FR), Transmediale Festival (DE), Onassis Cultural Center Athens (GR), Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (SI). Her works received awards and nominations at Prix Ars Electronica (AT), Starts Prize (AT), Japan Media Art Award (JP), Prix Cube (FR), New Technology Art Award (BE) and New Aesthetica Prize (GB).

www.agapea.si
www.praguecityuniversity.cz

MycoMythologies series expresses admiration for the work of Lion’s Mane Hericium erinaceus, Octavia E. Butler, Oyster mushroom Pleurotus ostreatus and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Erika Bornová: Madness is the Guardian of the Night

Address
GHMP Colloredo-Mansfeld
Karlova 189/2
110 00 Prague 1 – Staré Město
Map

The building is not barrier-free.

Accessibility
Sub A (Staroměstská station)
trams n. 2, 17, 18 (Karlovy lázně or Staroměstská stop)

Open
Tue-Sun 10 am – 6 pm

Admission

full 150 CZK
reduced 60 CZK

Curator: Martina Pachmanová

Five years after her last solo exhibition, Erika Bornová, a leading representative of the 1980s generation, presents new works. At the exhibition at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, which is named after a verse from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours, she builds on her previous works on the border between sculpture and painting, dedicated to important historical figures, their passions, dramas, obsessions and visions. But the centrepiece of the exhibition is her work on paper: self-portraits painted with obsessive compulsion during the artist’s temporary and partial loss of sight, and fanciful, large-scale “portraits” of underwater plants and animals that show the bizarre beauty of a world invisible to the human eye.

Erika Bornová is a storyteller of powerful, ambiguous stories. She reflects on the banality of life with grotesque exaggeration, tries to unriddle the complex entanglement of the human imagination and dreams with her typical passion, and gravely examines the complicated relationship of a human to the world, to others, to themselves, and to nature.

Often hidden beneath the surface of the seemingly ordinary motifs in Erika Bornová’s work are disturbing messages – frustrations, insecurities, anxieties, bitter-sweet obsessions, madness – which revive forgotten experiences and repressed feelings and attitudes. From the beginning, an important leitmotif of the artist‘s work has been a return to the past, whether in her personal or in a collective history. Initially, journeys back in time were materialized through mythological themes, but in the last twenty years, they have increasingly appeared through myth-ridden stories of important, but also contradictory and ambivalent personalities. Through their destinies, Bornová shows how subtle the line is between “normality” and madness, between genius and infatuation, as well as between devoted love and destructive obsession, and that insanity and misguidedness are closer to human existence than a rationalized modern society would be willing to admit. The title of the exhibition, Madness is the Guardian of the Night, refers to a line from the poetic cycle The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke, an aesthete, unbalanced loner, neurotic, seducer and exalted poet. Rilke, however, is not only present in the exhibition as one of the characters with whom Erika Bornová (as an avid reader) plays out an imaginary performance about love relationships that are full of passion, traumas, victims and scheming (Rilke and His Women, 2018–2019; Alma and Her Men, 2018–2019) but also as an invisible spiritual guide through an extensive series of self-portraits and fanciful, large-scale “likenesses” of submarine plants and animals.

In her Self-Portraits series (2018), over the course of several months, Erika Bornová relentlessly and resolutely captured the escaping form of her own face. Although the identical paper format and monothematic nature risked becoming routine, in more than 60 acrylic self-portraits, executed with spontaneous painterly gestures, the artist shows the instability of human identity as well as the imperfect, blurred, “groping” vision that disrupts the hegemony of sight in achieving sensory knowledge. The features of her face dissolve in patches of colour, as if emerging from a dream, a delirious state of mind delirious state of mind, or memories clouded by amnesia; her vision is blurred, her eyes look like wounds and sinkholes leading to nothingness; they are rather windows to the soul than organs of sensory reception. Yet, with the gradual recovery and restoration of her sight, Bornová turned away from introspective self-portraits and began to reveal the remarkable, bizarrely beautiful and partly disturbing (for humans also dangerous) life in the depths of the ocean. In her highly imaginative large-scale drawings, the longest of which measures seven metres, she was freely inspired by the plants and the bizarre, sometimes repulsively slimy, but distinctly ornamental bodies of aquatic invertebrates hidden from the human eye in the depths of the seas and oceans, or visible only under a microscope. The strange shapes and colours of the hydrogamous flora, siphonophorae, cephalopods, cnidaria, anthozoa, sea bivalves, gastropods and snails, many of which have been discovered only recently and have yet to be given their fantastic names, combine to create a visually op lent and surreal “natural history”. Although Erika Bornová makes no secret of her fascination with the extraordinary natural ornamentation and miraculous abilities of certain aquatic creatures (for example, the sea slug which, through self-regeneration, can separate its head from its body and grow a new body on top of it), she is concerned with more than the form and certainly not with naturalistic illustration. The cycles Plants (2019–2020) and Water Creatures (2021) are – in part environmental – a response to humanity‘s increasingly artificial, plastic, virtual and rationalised existence. As the artist herself puts it, it is “an escape from concrete and viruses into nature and a world that is elusive to humans”.

Erika Bornová (b. 1964) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1983–1988). Her early works were influenced by the neo-expressionism of “the New Wild” and postmodernism; during the late normalisation period, she presented them at unofficial Konfrontace/ Confrontations exhibitions. Since the 1990s, she has devoted herself exclusively to sculpture (from small objects to monumental figurative sculptures), using a material that was essentially unused in art – polystyrene. At the same time, she began to use other, generally non-sculptural and often kitsch materials (fur, fish scales, feathers, cellophane, costume jewellery rhinestones), which imprint a subversive pop(art) ironic undertone on her work. Bornová has long thematised interpersonal relationships, female identity, and the fetishisation of the female body in her work, as well as the loneliness of the individual in the midst of modern society. She is represented in the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, the Aleš South Bohemian Gall ry, the Klatovy – Klenová Gallery, the Museum of Arts and Design in Benešov, and in a number of private collections in the Czech Republic and abroad, including Collett Prague – Munich a.s. and the Wanniek Gallery. A retrospective Czech-English monograph, Fragile Monuments, which summarises the development of Erika Bornová‘s work and her exhibition activities, was published by the KANT publishing house in 2016. The same publisher is bringing out a bilingual publication, Madness is the Guardian of the Night, for the exhibition of the same name at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, with texts by Martina Pachmanová and Otto M. Urban.

City Therapy

Address
Prague 6 and Prague 7

Curators: Jitka Hlaváčková a Ludvík Hlaváček

The theme of this year’s festival is an exploration of the possibilities of the work of art as a tool for the healing of place and community, metaphorically speaking, City Therapy. We are aware that the city is not an inanimate backdrop to our lives, but one of its main actors. The dynamic pulse and zeitgeist of the city affects us all – sometimes more, sometimes less. Its physical and psychological functions directly influence the level of our individual condition. To achieve our therapeutic goals, it is necessary to search for effective art forms and tools specific to public space – the public language of art. It can enter into the discussion of urban concerns in a variety of ways: by encouraging, questioning, revealing, inspiring, criticising… Its manifestations can be material objects or social situations.

Exhibiting artists:

Veronika Zapletalová, Anežka Hošková, Matouš Lipus a kol., Darina Alster, Janek Rous, skupina Rafani, Milan Mikuláštík, Tomáš Svoboda, Richard Wiesner, Jiří Kovanda a Jiří Sádlo, Marie Doucet, Milena Dopitová, Mira Gáberová a Eva Jiřička, Dušan Zahoranský

For the realisation of the m3 2021 festival, fourteen artists / art collectives were approached who have a personal relationship to the selected location – they have been living and working there for a long time. They therefore approach their creative task not only from the position of an artist but also as citizens – insiders who know the local conditions and have inner motivation to initiate a positive change there. Together, we have tried to locate several neuralgic points (places and themes) on the body of the urban organism in both city boroughs and to inspire activity that sees the city not only in terms of a functional mechanism, but also as an environment of joy and surprise.

The fifth year of the m3 / Art in Space festival continues its tradition – every year the festival has taken place in a different Prague district, had a different theme and was prepared by a different curatorial duo. Thanks to this concept, which prevents artistic stagnation, visitors to the festival can encounter completely different approaches and perspectives on art and public space each year. The 2021 festival is taking place in the extensive area of the central districts of Prague 6 and Prague 7.

An Uncertain Season

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

Barrier-free entrance: basement and ground floor.

Open
Tue-Thu 10 am – 6 pm
Fri 1–6 pm
Sat-Sun 10 am – 6 pm

Admission

full 150 CZK
reduced 60 CZK

Curators: Magdalena Juříková, Jitka Hlaváčková, Jakub Král, Olga Malá

At first it seemed that we would not have enough material to realize this ambition but, surprisingly, it is a motif relatively close to the thinking of many artists of different generations. We decided to go in this direction partly for a reason that is obvious and which has haunted us for more than a year, without any guaranteed turning point to indicate the end of our critical pandemic situation. We wanted to spare artists the disappointment of investing their energy in a monographic exhibition here that would eventually not be open to the public. This gave us the opportunity, after a long period of time, to look at the content of our collections from a certain, as yet untested, angle.

Exhibited authors:

Karel Nepraš, Stanislav Kolíbal, Vladimír Janoušek, Jitka Svobodová, Karel Malich, Radoslav Kratina, Pavla Sceranková, Matěj Smetana, Petr Lysáček, Jiří Beránek, Aleš Veselý, Jindřich Wielgus, Hana Wichterlová, František Hodonský

Stanislav Kolíbal, Shaky Position, 1968, metal, 119×115×10 cm

We have been wracked by uncertainties and a degree of hopelessness since last spring. However, we have to experience this condition during our lives many times, with varying intensity and under various circumstances. References to it therefore appear in art just as naturally and inevitably. Sometimes it is a very inward and traumatising experience that permeates the final work, other times, it is a more general reflection on the meaning and nature of our existence or a manifestation of the search for spiritual harmony or faith. It is characteristic that this topic appears in acute social situations (e.g. in the so-called “magic 8 years” – years ending with the number 8 in modern Czech history), but also in the traumatizing years of normalization or post-revolutionary disillusionment. We present a particular sample of views, which are connected both with fateful social movements and with the personal dilemmas of each of the artists, or both at the same time.

The Highway Poems

Address
Cascades near the Vltavská underground station entrance
Map

Curator: Tereza Nováková

The Highway Poems exhibition is a part of a larger collection of slogans gathered by Jolana Havelková during her travels through Czechia. It reflects the change of the billboard copywriting language in the time between two global crises that have shaken the society: the financial crisis in 2008–2009 and the pandemic crisis (2020–2021). The slogans form the visual part as well as the content of the billboards.

Jolana Havelková, The Highway Poems, 2021, Galerie Vltavská. Photo by Ondřej Besperát

The advertising slogans usually encourage us to change our lives or to make our dreams come true, to buy a product, or to protect our belongings or our wellbeing. Once the subject of advertising is absent, the appropriated slogans are reduced to wordplays. They provide near-boundless space for our imagination, and encourage us to think of the content and meaning of the texts that have surrounded us for years.

The visual form of The Highway Poems has become the basis for the rhetorical performance by David Dvořák and Tomáš Jeřábek.

This project was picked up for realization by the jury that assessed the open competition of the Vltavská Gallery. The Vltavská Gallery was established by the joint effort of the Prague Public Transit Company and the Prague City Gallery as part of the program “Art for the City”, as an area suitable for temporary art interventions.

Stone Treasures from Prague Gardens

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

Barrier-free entrance: basement and ground floor.

Open
Tue-Thu 10 am – 6 pm
Fri 1–6 pm
Sat-Sun 10 am – 6 pm

Admission

full 150 CZK
reduced 60 CZK

Curator: Marie Foltýnová

Artistic decoration and minor architectural pieces formed an integral part of the historical gardens of Prague. These artworks, exposed to the vagaries of the weather for decades, gradually disappeared from the gardens; they were either destroyed irretrievably or had to be replaced by copies. Saved original sculptures and architectural elements were stored in the depositories of the Prague City Gallery. These exhibits include stone fountains with figural motifs of Nereids and dolphins from Troja Château, found in the 1980s during the reconstruction of the château and its gardens. The exhibition also presents original sculptures from Vrtba Garden, a group of Chinese figures from the Cibulka landscape park, and Braun’s sculptures from the Portheimka villa.

view into the exhibition Stone Treasures from Prague Gardens, Troja Château, 2018. Photo by Jiří Thýn

People from Vltavská

Address
underground C – Vltavská

Curator: Marie Foltýnová

For the experimental pilot period of the outdoor gallery, the Prague City Gallery curator decided to invite street photographer Kevin V. Ton to select pictures related to the immediate surroundings of the Vltavská station, or Lower Holešovice. The theme of the exhibition is clear and easy to understand: People from Vltavská. It also responds to the current pandemic that has affected life of people on the streets as well as exhibitions in indoor galleries.

Kevin V. Ton is a Prague-based acclaimed freelance photographer, winner of numerous prizes including the Everyday Life category award in the CZECH PRESS PHOTO 2020 competition. His lifelong passion is black and white humanistic documentary photography, and he’s especially focused on long-term projects. He’s been involved in street photography for years. Several years ago, he initiated the establishment of the photographic club VERUM PHOTO.)

The outdoor gallery on the supporting walls above the Vltavská underground station is a new project in the program “Art for the City”. The cascaded terraces will soon give way to the new architectural concept of the Bubny neighborhood, and the piazetta around the projected concert hall. Until the reconstruction starts, various exhibitions will take turns here in 3-month periods.The temporary installation was supported by the program “Art for the City”, in cooperation with the Prague Public Transit Company.

For more information on the program “Art for the City”, please visit umenipromesto.eu

Artists Crossing the Line

Address
underground stations B – Náměstí Republiky, Florenc; Karlovo náměstí; underground stations A – Můstek

Curators: Ondřej Horák, Anna Švarc

The exhibition of selected artists “Art Behind the Line” is a mutual effort of the Prague City Gallery and the Prague Public Transit Company, as part of the project Art in the Underground (Metro.um).

Four underground stations (Florenc B, Náměstí Republiky, Můstek A, Karlovo náměstí) are fitted with vacant panels formerly used for advertising (on the walls above the rails), which will become canvases for this year’s art project. We want to install contemporary art in the underground stations, to start a discussion on the role of art in the urban space. Most of the artworks are included in the collections of the Prague City Gallery, and communicate in a mutual art dialogue. The works will be fitted with captions, explaining the intentions of the authors to the general public.

The Prague Public Transit Company decided to support the short-term exhibitions in the underground, as a tool to improve the environment used by up to a million of passengers every day. There are dozens of worthy artworks installed in the Prague underground since the very beginning of its operations. Mosaics, sculptures, objects or light installations have been part of the experience since the underground’s first days in 1974. In past years, many were damaged, or even removed entirely. The unique environment of the Prague underground has featured works of internationally famous artists, such as Stanislav Kolíbal, Václav Cigler, the duo Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, František Vízner and many others.

The exhibition “Art Behind the Line” presents a selection of unique artworks by competent artist, such as Jiří Kovanda, Markéta Othová, Krištof Kintera, Timo, Lucia Sceranková, Ondřej Přibyl or the couples Lukáš Jasanský – Martin Polák and Hynek Alt – Aleksandra Vajd.

The photographs documenting their projects can be seen from May till the end of 2020 on the panels above the rails in the stations Náměstí Republiky B, Florenc B, Můstek A and Karlovo náměstí B. The selection of stations is based on the fact that the wall claddings have been already fitted with vacant advertising panels; before they are finally removed, they will become canvases for this art project. This also gave this unusual exhibition its name – the artworks are installed behind the safety line that runs along the platform. However, this line should not become a barrier between the passengers and the artworks. Therefore, the presentation also features captions related to the artworks. There will also be guided tours that will present the artworks to the public, together with the history and architecture of the stations.

František Bílek’s Chýnov Visions

Address
GHMP Bílkův dům
Údolní 133
391 55 Chýnov u Tábora
Map

The building is not barrier-free.

Download the audio guide to the birthplace of František Bílek and the Chýnov cemetery with his works. The guide with commentary by curator Martin Krummholz is in Czech and English and can be downloaded for free.

Open
Tue–Sun 10–12 am, 1–5 pm

In the winter season between 2 November 2020 and 10 May 2021, the house is accessible after previous arrangement only (please call +420 775 204 388).

Admission

full 50 CZK
reduced 30 CZK
discount 20 % Toulavka experience card holders

Curator: Hana Larvová

This exhibition presents the extraordinary Art Deco and Symbolist work of the artist, who built a base for his activities in his native town, Chýnov u Tábora, in the form of an individualistic family house with a studio. The architecture of the house, built by František Bílek in 1898 with raw brickwork and contemporary “folk” wooden elements and wood carvings, refers to the traditional Chýnov architecture. The representative selection of works represents the artist mainly as a sculptor, and also includes some samples of original furniture sets designed by Bílek for his daughter Berta and his son František Jaromír.

Dům Františka Bílka v Chýnově. Foto Oto Palán

Stone Treasures from Prague Gardens

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

Barrier-free entrance: basement and ground floor.

Open
Tue-Sun 1–6 pm

Admission

full 120 CZK
reduced 60 CZK

Art decorations and minor architecture formed integral part of historical gardens in Prague. These artworks, exposed to the weather for dozens of years, gradually disappeared from the gardens; either they were destroyed for good or had to be replaced by copies. Saved original sculptures and architectural elements were stored in the depositories of the Prague City Gallery. These exhibits include stone fountains with figures of the Nereid and dolphins from Troja Château, found in the 1980s during the reconstruction of the château and its gardens. The exhibition also presents original sculptures from Vrtbovská Garden, a group of Chinese people from the landscape park Cibulka, or Braun’s sculptures from Villa Portheimka.

Saša Spačal: MycoMythologies

Erika Bornová: Madness is the Guardian of the Night

Artotheque

City Therapy

An Uncertain Season

Artotheque

The Highway Poems

Stone Treasures from Prague Gardens

People from Vltavská

Artists Crossing the Line

František Bílek’s Chýnov Visions

Artotheque

Stone Treasures from Prague Gardens