31. 10., 10:00 - 20:00

Last year Radim Labuda has become a laureate of Jindřich Chalupecký Award and so he bought a car. The event titled The Last Rover is a part of an ongoing project, in which a secondhand Rover 75 has became the opportunity to create or enter situations and explore their various contexts. The event is a direct precursor to the author’s solo exhibition titled “Case Study” at Václav Špála Gallery in Prague.

In Britain it was known as the poor man’s Jaguar. In the context of Czech Republic the Rover becomes a strangely ambivalent object, vaguelly familiar yet recognisably alien. Shapes of its design do not evoke a direct identification only a projection of fetishist desire. The British manufacturer of Rovers went bankrupt and is now owned by one Indian and two Chinese companies. Formerly one of the flagships of British industry has now turned into a ghost and entered the domains of folk lore in alternative economic networks.

Radim Labuda has taken up a currently widespread form of importing spare parts. With the online bought vehicle he has travelled across Europe to Czech Republic and after the car’s MOT has expired leaves it to be sold out for spare parts. The event becomes an opportunity to explore depth of people’s relationship to an “object”, a space for individual fascination and psychological identification with an “object” and the shared attributes of a collective identity, which are all the more specific for their subcultural, historic and nostalgic values as they relate to a car now becoming extinct. Labuda sets up a situation in which banal process of dismantling the vehicle is transformed into a reflected deconstruction. The automobile becomes a stage where the persons involved unconsciously act out an obscure theatre of consumer fetish, fading of the european identity and search for psycho-social spare parts as well as alternatives for survival.

/Jiří Ptáček and Radim Labuda/

poděkování / special thanks:  První obalová společnost s.r.o.