Archive of all actions produced by MeetFactory Gallery.

PETR KRÁTKÝ, PETR MALINA, MAREK MEDUNA

opening on Friday January 22nd at 7pm
++ concert: KASPAR VON URBACH http://www.kvu.klangundkrach.net/, DJ´s: Manon Awst(UK) & Benjamin Walther(DE)
23. 1. - 21. 2. 2010
opening hours Wednesday - Sunday 3 - 8 pm

Independent observer: The exhibition is a collaborative work by Petr Krátký, Petr Malina and Marek Meduna. (…) The work on this project can be characterized as lying between pure collectivity when everything is consulted and being created jointly and severally by all participants, and individual presentations in the frame of the collective exhibition which are here and there guided by the interventions of wider consensus.

Pert woman: Simply a hatched-in-a-pub exhibition of three daubers.

Independent observer: “Equilateral triangle” is an exhibition without a curator. The authors have not been selected by anybody; nobody has elevated their works to a part of a higher whole.

Eulenspiegel: I have read somewhere that it is a symbol of the original unity; I wonder where it was…

Independent observer: The exhibition is conceived as in a way reflection of a painter’s medium and its wider context.

Pert woman: An exhibition without a painting is like a woman without a man.

Independent observer: …the artists of preceding generations have already shaken everything up properly and reciprocally, therefore the only thing possible is to immerse oneself into a wide river of denoting as art and to point at this world with your finger and say: it is that, it is itself, through these our intentions, experience and skills, through us ourselves.

Eulenspiegel: Now I cease to understand, sense in nonsense, perhaps.

Independent observer: The exhibition will probably be divided into three sections. 1) one, 2) two, 3) three

Pert woman: Three sisters, three rooms, three ideological depths. Three times three is nine. Multiplication table, phew!

Independent observer: The selection of artists takes place in the field of their common medium exceeding the inner boundaries of certain circles in the imaginary Prague’s contemporary art scene.

Pert woman: Ah! Masters painters indicated that they are on the right side, on the side of tolerance and openness, well, my friends, I suppose it’s coming now, those modest worthies are going to introduce themselves, yes, no doubt…

Petr Krátký: It fulfils the functions diverting from those to which they are supposed to serve. I use the properties of materials, the consequences of which are undesirable in the world of classical painting.
Jiří David: His work touches upon minimalism, conceptualism, formal aspects of art, processuality…
Petr Vaňous: Petr Malina’s painting expression is often described as idyllic with prevailing still themes and simple forms.
Michal Salák: A shadow is more important for him than what casts it.
Václav Magid: However, there is “no” that belongs inseparably as a shadow to every “yes”. In this way we can understand Marek Meduna’s authorial share…

Eulenspiegel: According to Lao Tse, a triangle rules the world. Sator arepo.

Petr Vaňous: On another level, the “dividing line” is observed on the sky surface itself, where gradual transitions between night and day take place. (…) Recent works indicate certain self reflection. (…) The author’s “self” enters the context of the painting. (…) The selection is purposive.

Pert woman: Who is that Vaňous, they’ve started to contradict one another, the right time to finish.

/ artist in residence exhibition

opening on Friday December 18 at 7 pm + Dj Viktorius & Vj Antena

19. 12. 2009 -  17. 1. 2010

Sascha Pohle / Reframing the Artist

Reframing the Artist,  90 min,  2009

more…

Michal Moravčík / SUBTILNÍ HISTORIE

more…

Adam Holý / CROSFIELD

more…

MeetFactory Artists in Residency program is supported by The Embassy of The Netherland Kingdom Prague, Fond BKVB, Visegrad Fund, Goethe- Institut Prague, Czech and German Fund of Future.

opening on Friday November 13th at 7 pm + music by Kiss Tempera & Black Dumpling, Dirt, ANTENA & dží.
exhibition will run till December 13th

In his exhibition „Visions of Macbeth”, Markus Selg concentrates the classic tragedy of Shakespeares´ Macbeth into a scenario of memories and dreams.
Using filmprojections, music, fog, wind, light and minimalistic requisites Selg creates a dreamscape throughout the MeetFactory Gallery which tells the story of Macbeth from a point of no return. From a point, where all hope is lost, euphoria is gone and destiny is certain.

Visions of a tempting prophecy;
The dream of becoming king and queen;
The illusion of ever lasting power and invulnerability;
All these ghosts appear and fade constantly throughout the hypnotic scenario of the
exhibition which culminates in the Ruins of Inverness (Lady Macbeth and Macbeth´s
former castle). Encouraged by the soundscape, including Hindemith´s Harmonie der Welt, Mahler´s 9th and Liszt´s Finale of Faust, time slows down to an expanded moment
of bitter sweet memories - waiting for the end to come.

CHORUS MYSTICUS

All things transitory
Are only symbols;
What is insufficient,
Here becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here is accomplished;
The eternal feminine
Pulls us upwards.

(Goethe, Faust, 1831)

Markus Selg, born in 1974 Singen, Germany, lives and works in Berlin, has always taken the individual work as his point of departure. Working in a wide variety of media - paintings, sculptures, computer prints and more recently also moving images - his integration of spatial structures and custom-made lighting systems began to precipitate comprehensive installations at an early stage. The universal and eternally recurring motifs of human history and mythology - creation, fall, perdition and resurrection - play a central role in these scenarios.

From 1996 to 2000 Markus Selg was part of the Akademie Isotrop (Hamburg), of which he was a founding member and co-editor of Isotrop magazine. He’s a founder and director of the publisher Possible Press.

Visions of Macbeth is not the very first exhibition of Markus Selg in Czech, following Der Übergang in Karel Tusch´s gallery Na bidýlku, Brno (2004) or full-scale “dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk” exhibitions composed together with the artist Astrid Sourkova Ketzer & Co. - Montage auf der Achse Brünn - Berlin, Dům umění, Brno (2006) and Heretic & Co. - The Golden City, Jiří Švestka Gallery, Prague (2007).
Markus Selg artworks are part of the collections of  Karel Tusch and Wannieck Gallery among others.

Selected solo exhibitions: Die Hautung - Muskel der Menschheit II, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin (2009), Delphi - The human Rainbow, Daniel Hug, Los Angeles (2007), Traum der Sarazenin, Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin (2007), PAX - Lektion in Frieden, Cabinet, London (2006), MolocH, Oldenburger Kunstverein (2006), Das Testament, Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln (2004), Muskel der Menschheit, Galerie Christine Mayer, München (2003), Weltausstellung, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2000).

Selected group exhibitions: Spuren der Sonne - Eine apokalyptische Oper / M. Selg, J. Kounellis, W. Herzog, b 05, Montabaur (2009), Heaven, 2nd Athens Biennal (2009); Der Müde Tod - oder der Gang über die ekstatische Treppe, KAI10 - Raum für Kunst, Düsseldorf (2009); Ciclo Kenneth Anger, Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon (2009), Vertrautes Terrain - Aktuelle Kunst in & über Deutschland, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2008), Imagination Becomes Reality, ZKM, Karlsruhe and Sammlung Goetz, München (2007/2006), Thetrouble with fantasy, Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2005), deutschemalereizweitausenddrei, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003), Offene Haare, Offene Pferde - Amerikanische Kunst 1933-45, Kölnischer Kunstverein (2002).

Exhibition is suppotted by the Czech-German Fund For the Future.

podpora / support: AV MEDIA, a.s.

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.

Opening on Sunday Oct 11th at 7pm

The project with a mobile multi-media object independent on traditional brick-and-mortar galleries. It is a certain kind of street art - the art coexisting and closely related to the urban structure and reality. The Videomobile project communicates right on the spot and reacts to current stimuli concerning political and cultural life, or it just turns attention to simple and trivial situations which are then confronted with the background they emerged from or were found in. Videomobile is an object with audio and video technologies hidden in it. It is placed on the roof of a car which is used for moving various distances and getting to a given destination. The Videomobile’s inputs and interventions remain time-independent and you can encounter it anywhere in the course of the festival.

In his work, Richard Wiesner uses sounds, visual material and texts in their original forms. They acquire altered meanings through their mutual combinations and the forms of presentation. He draws inspiration from the news flow in media along with the motives coming from urban reality. He is interested in current state of political culture, its presentation and possible promotion.

14.10. - 5.11. 2009

opening on Sunday October 11th at 7 pm
+++ hudba/music by: Moduretik 8Bit/elektronika www.myspace.com/moduretik, Marc Bijl+++

“Collateral Damage” is damage that is unintended or incidental to the intended outcome. This duo-show has the same tension for the artists who come from totally different backgrounds. Silke Koch (1964) is from Leipzig and has a more observing and research based approach towards complex questions about ‘the construction of reality’ in a changing political system where as Marc Bijl (1970, Leerdam, Holland) has a more confrontational and melancholic directness to the same topics…

“Collateral Damage” is at the same time a military term which is often used in a political and social context. This is also the field of intrest of both artists. What is reality in a media-structured society and to what ‘damage’ does that lead coming from different political spectrums?

Artist in Residence exhibition

Miriam Visaczki & Claire Waffel (GER)
Igor Sevcuk (NL)
Antena (CZ)

opening on Tuesday September 15th at 7 pm + playlist by NiKa&Grae
16. 9. - 4. 10. 2009
exhibition is prolonged to October 4th

MIRIAM VISACZKI AND CLAIRE WAFFEL
Dancing with tears in my eyes

Miriam Visaczki and Claire Waffel’s installation concerns family history and its narration. What precisely may be described as the place of origin of a family and does this place continue to bear relevance after several generations?

While researching the German and Jewish history of the town Poběžovice, close to the German border in Western Bohemia, the focus of their research was transformed.

Poběžovice had a strong Jewish community for centuries. In the 17th century the famous rabbi Baal Shem Tov from Galicia bathed in the Mikvah of this town. Therefore, for many years Poběžovice was a place of pilgrimage for Hasidic Jews. In 1939 Poběžovice became part of the so-called Sudetenland and was annexed to Germany. The Jewish population had to flee or were otherwise killed in concentration camps. In the 1990s the Mikvah was rediscovered by a rabbi from New York, which resulted in Hasidic Jews from the US, Canada, Belgium and other countries travelling to Poběžovice again to bathe in the Mikvah.

The artists selected 8 places that form part of the research into their own family histories and documented these: Meclov, Tanvald, Svitávka, Prague (Czech Republic), Valbert, Waldmünchen (Germany), Kolomyia (Ukraine) and London (UK). In cooperation with different family members they developed a narration that links Poběžovice with these towns.

The artists are presenting works of Miriam’s father Verner V. Visaczki. He was born in Strakonice in 1944 and worked as an architect his whole life. Since retiring in 2001 he has been creating square graphic drawings, which he calls „Metopes” after the example of square plates above the columns in a Greek temple. In these Metopes he archives encounters, birthdays, the total sum of days he has been alive into a raster of 7 by 7 squares. For this exhibition the artists have constructed a narrative out of the collection of his drawings, which is divided into chapters of the 9 places.

IGOR SEVCUK
Haso - a synthesis of the global hero, 2007
Video installation: 2 synchronous projections 14:00, 1 monitor video 4:50

In the video the man is telling jokes and reading from a book. “The moment that Haso entered my room I perceived from his face and manner of walking that he was in the coldly-correct frame of mind which was his when he felt dissatisfied with himself …”
The reading performance of the man is vulnerable - he appears to be a macho type from a peripheral country.

The nickname Haso is commonly used in Bosnian jokes. In the video installation Haso is positioned between the fragments of ‘Russian classic literature’ and ‘Austrian classical music’. Four transnational jokes add up to the unease of Haso’s anti-hero story.

ANTENA - installation and performance, 1st floor

ANNA 2V2A 50Hz installation a meditative image (4 TV monitors - live synchro video/audio), a set of video loops converted into the audio form as low-threshold and high-threshold harmonies based on 50Hz frequency.

ANNA 2V2A 50Hz performance 15 & 22 work in progress
cca 25 min
are abstract synchro audio/video images in a continuous mind stream of the conscious „Self” and its disorders issuing from a reflection on an individual’s present…

!!! warning… it is not advisable for people suffering from epilepsy to visit this performance (contrastive B/W strobe images at 50 Hz and strong sounds are used during the performance)

curator: Edith Jeřábková

participating artists:
Jubal Brown (CAN) Filip Cenek (CZ) Richard Healy (UK) Timothy Roberts (UK) Erik Tode (NL) Charlie Tweed (UK) Matěj Smetana (CZ) Conrad Ventur (USA) George Young (UK)

opening on Friday August 7^th at 7pm
++ MIKY DISCJOCKEY, Nuria Fragoso (MEX) - dance performance ++

poster design André Pahl

Exhibition is supported by BritishCouncil

August 8^th - September 6^th 2009

opening hours Wednesday - Sunday 3 - 8 pm

If we understand art only in its sense of a specific mechanism for moving  boundaries and temporarily remove its evolutionary frustrations we are bound to find many limitations in the current situation which have, without any obvious revolutions, advanced in various directions (social, psychological, scientific, ethnographic etc.) Despite all of this, contemporary art and thinking often sink into doubts. It questions itself and looks for its own possibilities outside itself. Even the most unobtrusive and altruistic forms are not explicitly satisfying.

Such a position is a fertile ground for romantic comebacks in the shape of parallel worlds and escapisms into new exoticisms being found either entirely outside the galaxy or inside the society itself, and not outside the geographical borders of the so-called civilized world in the manner of colonial politics. Contemplating the beginning and the end becomes a logical theme in the atmosphere of a globalized market and absence of superior ideological concept. Oversaturation, plurality, utopia, exoticism viewed as something different and distinct reflect the decay of the former hierarchy of values and power. Kaleidoscopic perception of the world does not allow us to believe in its apocalyptic unique termination and to anticipate it as one great and impressive image. Evolution contradicts itself, flows back into the past, offering plurality. The formal capacity of visual material may transcend its limits into more ultimate quantities and be enriched by irrational constructions reminiscent of other ways of organization such as organic structures, ritual, occult, conspiratorial, survivalistic, doctrinal, pseudo-scientific, and other empirical entities.

This exhibition is not intended to glorify the big questions concerning the civilization landmarks, (e.g. like   “Apocalypse” - an exhibition held at the turn of the millenium at the Royal Academy in London, the sequel to the groundbreaking Sensation exhibition). Its aim is to think about the return of socio-irrational motives into the art of the youngest generation, about a new kind of responsibility of art and to introduce various formal ways of stepping beyond the boundaries of objectivity and reason as well as looking for the relationship between reality and fiction. The world’s oversaturation with possibilities of visual expression and frivolous and manipulative handling of images in today’s consumer and political society leads to hiccup like forms of artistic transcriptions such as collages, assemblages, edits, mash-ups, accumulations, stroboscopic and kaleidoscopic effects, channel surfing, sampling, various forms of destructive or intentionally raw inteferences into the traditional forms.

The exhibiting artists are mostly last year’s graduates, however, most of them  already have a distinctive exhibiting history. Among the more established but still rebellious artists is Jubal Brown. Working in Toronto, he is an artist, curator, founder and a member of several collectives focused on the production and presentation of specific film genres.  He is presented as one of the members of the now defunct collective  Fame Fame  which engaged itself in new forms of video-art reacting to the complex transformation of video-art following its embrace of  forms associated with new technologies and internet portals, djing and vjing, thematically focused on activist and socio-political commentaries. The presented video - Total War - is based on confronting YouTube and Hollywood culture, interchanging entertainment and reality, staged and original (real) resources. Themes such as sex, violence and death are absolutely unavoidable. They are not directed towards a catharsis but rather their unbearable concentration makes a reference to the content of current mass media and entertainment images which are slightly more diluted. All the material ultimately comes from public TV and internet sources. On the formal level he employs a critical and parodic use of the methods common with YouTube users which he transforms into a feature-length film collage.

Filip Cenek. Living and working in Prague he has continually, individually and collectively (collective Fiume and cooperations with Jiří Havliček and Magdalena Hrubá) practicaly and theoreticaly devoted himself to film, video and animation. In 2004 he was awarded the Tranzit Developmental Grant for the work in the area of visual media and participates in NewNew! and FreshFilmFest festivals. He is a co‑author of the visual aspect of the electronic project Midi Lidi. Factual resources and real stories in his videos and video-installations are deprived of linear narratives, he is not interested in telling a story, on the contrary, the concrete shapes are blurred and the contents are obscured. A spectator senses a concrete inspirational source. Through generalization it can also becomes his or her own problem. The intense and urgent atmosphere builds a larger frame-work, which when accepted, allows us to observe the functioning of  the individual and collective memory and to deal with an event as a new myth.

Richard Healy, living in London, works with a relatively narrow scope of geometrical abstraction and graphic art and design. Even in such relatively constricted area the artist finds unlimited thinking resources and possibilities of its formal usage. He is fascinated with the new energy of old geometric directions, pop-art and op-art and at the same time he handles them very cautiously, being fully aware of their limitations. By profound application of geometric principles he misleads the spectator from the path of retro entertainment to the way of abstract frustration.

The non-existence of a higher ideal and the consumer principles forming the essence of our society which is in turn used as an instrument for its control and manipulation create a nearly paranoid image of the world built up on the conspiratorial networks or occultism. Timothy Roberts, an artist from London, uses these irrational concepts as a powerful aesthetic source for his installations. Weird mixture of both imaginary and real cults and rituals is presented as a spontaneous counterpart to the pragmatism of global economy and the feigned altruism of pro-government ecology. Through the destruction of the classical sculptural genre, he metaphorically attacks and questions the present “democratic” value hierarchies and draws the attention to the hidden and raw undertows which permeate his rather harsh assemblage technique.

Matěj Smetana, living in Prague, contemplates the purpose of art, functionality of a form and its relation to the content.  The eventual end of art was a topic he episodically dealt with in his comic strip - Poslední malíři (The Last Painters) - taking place in the age of a post nuclear war. In one of his best known works - an animated film Je to jenom film (It’s only a film) - the emptiness of  form and the content react to the  saturated  horror film imagery. The film is a result of mechanical tracing and animation of several cult horror trailers. Another ultimate variation is Hradčanoid - a spinning silhouette of the Hradčany castle. Infinity, on the other hand, is handled by means of fractal animation.

Erik Tode has devoted himself almost exclusively to drawing, in both large and small formats. Exoticism of the incorporated attributes of African culture reflects the change in perceiving the exotics - not as strange and fascinating but more as something parallel. For Tode it is just one of the options. In the merging of African and western cultures he looks for the missing links in the society of western Europe. A similar parallel world reflecting his reality is the army - a society with a specific organizational structure which the author  transforms in the spirit of his romantic and aesthetic needs.

Charlie Tweed, living in London, constructs other worlds and other alter-egos. He puts on a pragmatic face in a fictive pre-apocalyptic world and misuses scientific information to construct hypothetical scenarios for the future to give some sort of premature potential survival instructions. Recycled film footage and sound collages, sometimes being made indistinct by simulated mechanical damage, mingle with his own film content. Using a captivating atmosphere, he melodramatically brings the moment of a worldwide collapse of science, technology, ecology and the whole civilization into the present tense.

Civilization and popular cultural products such as sentimentality, glamour and emotionality are the topics for Conrad Ventur, an artist living in New York. He employs various media - particularly video-installation and drawing. The basis of his work is always conceptual, yet he is able to divert the spectator’s attention to almost  romantic moods. He is an editor of the ‘Useless’ artistic magazine, published twice a year. His main interest is in original music performances designed for TV broadcasting, which he downloads  from YouTube, puts them in new settings, creates new scenes and presents them in the form of a kaleidoscopic mosaic intended to evoke a strong emotional memory, a vivid recollection and a monument to a certain event. For this exhibition he is presenting a video-installation dedicated to Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit. The historical background of Billie Holiday’s performance in 1939 is no less important - Barney Josephson, the founder of the first ratially integrated night club, Cafe Society, in Greenwich Village, New York, introduced Billy Holiday to this song, written by a high school teacher Abel Meeropol as a protest agains racism and lynching in the Southern states.

George Young, another artist living in London, also succumbing consciously to the fascination by scientific illusion, associating it with the beauty of deconstructing an image - an artistic evidence. While his drawings and paintings on paper with their symbolic, scientific and utopist content are overlapped by structural elements of a physical painting, factual utopia takes place in the questioning of a visual icon which may reveal some new points of view but in the end it seems to return to itself.

“So Much More”  deliberately ignores the requirements for the realization of certain tasks or thematic contents in particular works; it rather tries to fulfill its conception as a whole, i.e. not through the illustrative show of separate exhibits.

Thursday July 23th at 7 p.m. - presentation of C. Amorales´, J. Lede´and A. Pahl record label NUEVOS RICOS  given by André Pahl 

nuevosricos.com/mp3/gold_revised.mov
nuevosricos.com/mp3/SILVERIO-EL_DEDO_SUIZO.mov

The record label project NUEVOS RICOS was set up in 2004 by Carlos Amorales (visual artist, Mexico) and Julian Lede (musician/performer, Mexico). Shortly afterwards André Pahl (designer, Germany) joined. Nuevos Ricos represents 16 groups/performers from Mexico, Argentina, Europe and Russia that create a catalogue of highly eclectic sounds: Caveman-Electronica, Garage & Gabba Punk, Cumbias Lunaticas and mexican Eurodisco.

NUEVOS RICOS are convinced that through the use of irony they can play a healthy game within the boundaries of the art and the music industries to respond against an attitude where the products are defined solely by the needs of the markets and the institutions.
All their acts have a show quality that is cathartic - during the events the borders between stage and public start to vanish. Nuevos Ricos are precise about their visual side, which is strongly graphic. All artwork is done by Amorales/Pahl and by guest artists. It has always been of Nuevos Ricos’ interest to play with the role of the audience, the context and the setting. That resulted in invitation to participate at music events in the classical sense but as well in experimental projects in an art context.
In Mexico’s press, Nuevos Ricos is unanimously quoted as one of two major independent labels; record-colossus EMI proposed a distribution deal with the label with Silverio on the verge of being Mexico’s top sex symbol.
www.nuevosricos.com

Lukáš Machalický, Jan Pfeiffer

closing party on Thursday July 23th at 7 p.m.
studio no. 38, 1st floor

opening on Thursday June 25th at 7 p.m.
studio no. 38, 1st floor

26. 6. - 23. 7. 2009

Thursday July 23th at 7 p.m. - presentation of C. Amorales´, J. Lede´and A. Pahl record label NUEVOS RICOS  given by André Pahl 

curator: Adrian Notz (Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich)

opening on Thursday June 25th at 7pm

exhibition will run till July 26th / opening hours Wednesday - Sunday 3 - 8 pm

poster design: Elektrosmog, Zurich / poster_CarlosAmorales.pdf

main partner: AV MEDIA, a.s.

Exhibition is generously supported by: Mexican Ministry of foreign affairs, Embassy of Mexico in Prague

special thanks to: Lucía Alvarez, André Pahl, Falkensteiner Hotel Maria Prag

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Since 1999 the Mexican artist Carlos Amorales (*1970, lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico) has organized an archive based on photographs of digital vectorial drawings that range from personal sources to political and popular iconography: The Liquid Archive. These abstracted black and white images are synthesized into ambiguous forms that combine silhouettes with traces that have strong iconographic character.For the exhibition recently opened in Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Amorales coined the term „Skeleton Image” to describe the function of the Liquid Archive. The images in the archive are images that exist before producing an actual art work, be it a sculpture, a painting, paper cut out, a performance, or an animation. The archive is the skeleton of Amorales’ body of work.To explore the possibilities of the archive further, Amorales started an animation studio in Mexico City in August 2005, named Broken Animals. The aim was to make animated films and artworks through a collective of draftsmen, motion-graphic designers, media researchers, and a musician. Beyond mere visual production, the studio emphasized formal and thematic analysis through a weekly film club and a monthly seminar with guests that have included an urbanism researcher, a traditional animator, philosophers, filmmakers, artists, and musicians. At each session, the film club showed fragments of different films that could be related to subjects that the studio was busy with at the given moment. Broken Animals have also built a library of films and books, so each member of the studio could do research.This working project - an animation collective - is a conscious pauperization of the Walt Disney Studios model: it is a contemporary effort to redirect the understanding of fantasy toward obscurity, where the fantastic can stimulate questions (as well as emotions), without giving answers.With the exhibition “Broken Animals Revisited: Animations by Carlos Amorales” the MeetFactory Gallery is introducing Carlos Amorales to the Czech audience by presenting all eight animation works that have been produced by the Broken Animals collective. The exhibition not only tries to explore the visual vocabulary of Amorales’ Liquid Archive in the animation collective but also the animation principles of the collective.In the first and biggest room of the gallery one can see five single channel animations: The Forest (2003), Rorschach Test Animation (2004), Manimal (2005), Faces (2007) and Discarded Spider (2008).While “The Forest” is still very playful and light, a little bit like a music video, the “Rorschach Test Animation” already very clearly shows a tendency of the collective’s animations: experimentation with the viewer on a visual and subconscious level. The “Rorschach Test Animation” plays with the spectator’s own imagination. In fact it teases the viewer, because just at the moment when one is able to grasp an image and maybe even construct a meaning, it disappears and one is thrown back to one’s own subconscious level.”Manimal” is the only video produced by Broken Animals that has a clear visual narrative structure. For once, one could say, it is the soundtrack, composed by Julian Lede, that doesn’t have a narrative development, rather than the visuals composed by Ivan Martinez Lopez, another member of the collective and also of Amorales’ studio.In most other video animations meaning is not produced by a narrative but by the visual compositions. This is very explicit in “Faces“. Here Lopez animated the visuals in quite a confusing and abstract visual way. Only from time to time, one can actually recognize concrete forms such as faces or birds. Most of the time the frame is too full of information. The spectator is thus much more focused on the soundtrack composed Julian Lede. It is fascinating to notice how the images adapt to the sound. How the same visual information can be interpreted variously depending on the sound, giving totally different meanings. The sound also pretends to be an old record, which gives the animation a kind of old flavour to it. Here it clearly also shows one of the few references Amorales mentions when talking about the Broken Animals animations: “The Adventures of Prince Ahmed” from 1926, a feature-length animated film by the German animator Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film and it features a silhouette animation technique invented by Reiniger which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. The technique she used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets.In “Discarded Spider” Amorales also goes back to this kind of shadow theater. Instead of using puppets, the video shows the artist’s own shadow forming and shaping giant spiders’ webs with a lot of strength.In the second room of the MeetFactory Gallery the video animations “Dark Mirror” (2004) and “Useless Wonder” (2006) are presented alternatively. One day, spectators can see “Dark Mirror”, the following day they can see “Useless Wonder”. The open-ended scenarios Amorales constructs in his animations originating in the archive also transcend into collaborations with artists and musicians. Thus these two animations were done together with graphic designer André Pahl, who is, together with Julian Lede and Carlos Amorales, a founding member of the record label Nuevos Ricos (www.nuevosricos.com).For “Dark Mirror“, Amorales commissioned Pahl to create an animation using the Liquid Archive. Pahl says: “The animation takes up this principle of suggesting rather than defining. Instead of making up a story with a narrative I wanted to create more separated animated scenes that function as individual canvases.  Nevertheless, brought together they form one entity, one picture that might assemble to a bundle of fantasies and fears - like a mirror of the viewers’ emotions. Concurrently Amorales asked composer José Mariá Serralde to generate a score inspired by a selection of images derived from the same source. He added a soundtrack that overlaps the animation at random moments (the music is 15 minutes in length, the animation 6 minutes). Pahl: “By doing it this way we wanted to take a step away from an ‘animated clip’ more towards something more infinite and open. So every time you’d see it the notion would be different.” The literal reflection of Serralde playing his music is projected on the other side of the screen. Together the two facets of the work form a coherent whole that positions Amorales more in the role of a mediator than an editor or director.

“Useless Wonder“, the second animation that Pahl did for Amorales is - according to Pahl - inspired by “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe, a fictionalized narrative about an ill-fated Antarctic expedition. Pahl: “It deals with the ambiguity of fear and fascination that can attract and repel the focus of the spectator at the same time”. “Useless Wonder” combines Amorales’ graphic imagery of the animal, human, and natural worlds, abstract forms and Pahl’s sense for bizarre and androgynous motion and camera movement. On the front side, scenes that feel both evolutionary and apocalyptic unfold. On the back side, the floating and recomposing map of the world - moving sometimes gently but often aggressively - shows the macro level of the front screen’s detail view. The soundtrack is composed by Julian Lede.

In the third room, the latest Broken Animals production is installed: Psicofonias (2008). Here again Pahl was asked to make a realization of Amorales’ and Lede’s idea to build a virtual pianola with the representation of Amorales’ drawings by dots. A realtime-animation translates the drawing’s dots into musical notes that trigger two synthesizers playing the sound of a piano and of a harpsichord, which is also known as cembalo widely used in baroque music. The virtual pianola displays on two screens a selection of Amorales’ drawings, represented by dots, which scroll infinitely towards the bottom, and as they approach it, they play a note and vanish.

For this exhibition, the Swiss design studio Elektrosmog was asked to create a poster. Normally, designers are invited to work with the visual material in the Liquid Archive. Elektrosmog decided to restrict themselves to typography only. Instead of interpreting the visual material from the Liquid Archive they focused much more on interpreting Amorales’ method or principle of reassembling shapes within in a given pattern.

“Broken Animals Revisited: Animations by Carlos Amorales” is curated by Adrian Notz from Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Just a month ago, Notz and Amorales opened a small show in Cabaret Voltaire, where the whole Liquid Archive is available as postcards. This is just a smaller step within the context of wider research and discussion that Amorales and Notz are having about the Liquid Archive and the use and meaning of archives in general. Therefore even this show, being kind of didactic and presenting the whole body of animations by Amorales, can be part of this discussion.

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selected texts

Carlitos Way
Or the Artist as Framework, circa 2000 AD

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

 I do not know which of us has written this page.

                                                                                         Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I”
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Carlos Amorales is a phony. Even his name is phony. But it is in this calculated phoniness–delicately crafted between plain disguise and a latent reinvention–that we can find not only the kernel of his own artistic exploration but, most significantly, the most distinctive of signs of what the very practice of art might mean for some of its most successful practitioners at the present time, circa 2000 AD. In fact, it might not be phony at all to suggest that a good deal of the effectiveness of Amorales’s works stems out of the rare offering they provide: they spell out not only a way of conceiving the artistic practice but, most importantly, they reveal an account of the picture of subjectivity that is behind such beliefs. With him, it is all on display.

Precisely because of his phony phoniness, with Amorales one gets the full package-or even better, the Full Monty-as he covers everything up in order to expose it all without shame: his primitive elements, the set of rules by which they were combined, and even an explanation of the history and the normative force of these rules. The guy might be self-conscious, but we are still, in each one of his shows, somehow able to get a glance at it all.

Probably because he is not completely conscious of it, or maybe because he is, Amorales has been able to transform his keen, self-conscious awareness into an iconographic system (that is, wrestlers, rock musicians, dancing spectators, an archive of images) in which part of the magic is the illusion that no one element of it is more important than the other. The enduring appeal of some of his most remarkable work is the detailed, diligent display of a system of self that, while acquiring different forms, always begins by establishing the basic critical distance–through phoniness-between first- and third-person stances that one can host within oneself. If high modernism was concerned with trying to show us how to contain multitudes (from Whitman and Baudelaire to Pessoa and Eliot), Amorales actually makes a spectacle out of it. And he sells the tickets and posters for the show, serves snacks in the food court, manages and coaches some of the most remarkable characters of his own circuit, divides the profits among them, and posts the earnings for his investors on the Web. He probably even tapes the whole thing and sells the DVD–the legal one and the pirated one–on a phony Internet site.

Not a bad way at all to go public, in these complicated financial times, for the perennial startup that Amorales’s self seems to be. Although we already know that it has never been a bad business plan to be one’s own pimp (what is the history of art filled with, if not with a list of the best of them?), what is particularly relevant in Amorales’s business model (i.e., poetics) is the way in which this is achieved and how it actually marks a departure from the common way of drawing authority from authorship, and of pinning authorship to the complicated web that is involved in the production of a work of art.

It is precisely this way of going public, with the staging of an internal landscape that is not necessarily the direct transcription of its internal drama, where we can actually pin down the critical difference that distinguishes Amorales’s work from prior versions of achieving self-knowledge. It is, in fact, a strong epistemological intuition that seems to be the force behind the whole Amorales enterprise and what fuels it so powerfully: that self-knowledge is not uniquely immediate, and that it cannot be achieved by mere introspection.

Since his first artistic project–where he traded “personalities” with a friend in the Netherlands so that the friend could attend his courses as “Carlos Amorales” at the arts academy where he himself was pursuing a degree, and he could return to Mexico-Amorales has shown a complete, unnerving disdain for the rosy picture of selfhood as one capable of being completely transparent to itself (in other words, capable of having complete and immediate access its own knowledge), which has been the cornerstone of our image of subjectivity since, possibly, Descartes, and that only recently has been showing signs of erosion.

Pointing to those first ruptures, the high roller Amorales continues to bet against this picture. Or at least, he teases it out and exposes its now glaring signs of exhaustion.

He has done it over and over. And in the end, his speculations might actually help burst the bubble of transparency of selfhood. If the entire thing cracks, modernity as a whole might be our next foreclosure. The domino effect that would short-circuit the entire epistemological system would be devastating. Think of this possible scenario:

If one does not believe that the notion of selfhood is based foremost on the capacity of oneself-the first person-to know about itself in a transparent and immediate way, because it has privileged access to our senses (we know it hurts because we feel it, not because someone tells us it does), then the conflation between person and self (read: subjectivity) on which we have based our whole system would almost be bankrupted. And if this picture of subjectivity were to be challenged too profoundly, all its derivatives (authority, authorship, responsibility) would lose their value.

Panicking, isn’t it?

Amorales hopes so. He bets you will. He likes people to panic about themselves. (That might be why so much of his work’s power is derived from the vague sense of fear that it elicits). He actually likes you to go home feeling that the fundamentals of our own subjective picture might be not as sound as we thought they were.

That is why his performances and actions cannot be confused with the usual pantomime of the self–which unfolds into the cast of multiple personae we allegedly carry with us-and display the internal, solipsistic drama of existence that we have grown used to. They are all phony. Really phony. The real phonies. They are all based on the belief that the self truly has a privileged knowledge of its own internal affairs, and he cannot let them have their way any longer.

Instead, Amorales stages the tragicomic vicissitudes of self-knowledge: a subject that is critically distanced from its own self, one that feels that first-person introspection is somehow not enough to achieve self-knowledge. That is the play he has been showing. And it has been a box office hit.

In his hands, our old, dusty internal Cartesian theater has just launched a hot new season, and it looks as if its installations have been totally renovated: even new stages have been added.

Take for example his Amorales vs. Amorales project (1996-2001), for which he made himself a name in the art world arenas by literally matching them up with wrestling arenas. It was during the time when adding a share of the personal vernacular, especially if you were third-worldly enough (as Amorales luckily is), somehow boosted your chances of having your name in the biggest font on the largest marquees. It was obviously a hit. Audiences were, as one critic put it, “mexmerized” by the spectacle. But at the count of three, critics failed to see how Amorales was, behind the curtains, betting against Amorales, and counting on losing the matches he fought against himself.

It is particularly telling that many of the early commentators on his work were mostly interested in decoding the implications of the appropriation of this hyper-Mexican low-brow iconography and its circulation in a larger international scene, and paid little attention to the dramatization of self that lay at its very origin. Thus, they failed to see how the spectacle of the self was masked in the calculated-and phony-muscling of national pride.

They couldn’t see past the phony, and for this, they missed half of the show. Only through critically establishing a distance between selfhood and personhood, was Amorales able to display himself as a framework capable of holding in its center stage, and as main attraction of the night, the struggle that the first- and third-person points of view carry endlessly inside our selves. They hold a tight grip on each other because they are, essentially and systematically, interconnected and entangled. One cannot know oneself, and hence construct a persona, if one does not take into consideration that the avowal of our attitudes and expressions, from a third-person point of view, constitutes an essential part of our self-knowledge. The immediacy of the first person does not cut it anymore. It cannot hold up the old metaphysical scaffolding anymore.

It is Amorales’s ability to open and reveal himself as a framework -in which the essential asymmetry between self and other, in our very own concept of personhood, is played out-that makes him an emblem of the painful decoupling between self and personhood, a concept that we are now trying to come to grips with. And although Amorales is hardly the Robin Hood of personhood (stealing from the self and giving it back to subjectivity), it is about time we realize that the stinging pain of the backbreaking move to our own sense of self that we might end up receiving in his shows entails a corrective measure to rein in an out-of-control picture of subjectivity and bring it down a notch–a crisis we will all inevitably have to wrestle with, sooner or later.

Amorales is still betting against you.

                                                                                    José Falconi, Harvard University

 

support

Koneckonu_plan.pdf

Noam Darom, Martin Hrubý

Noam Darom, Martin Hrubý

opening on Wednesday June 3rd at 7pm
music by: Data Live, www.myspace.com/datalive

4.6. - 19.6. 2009

The discourse about apocalyptic visions of the end of the world and repeatedly emerging expectations of it has been popular with the art scene for more than just the past few years. Our aim is to create a down to earth “save what there is most valuable in contemporary Czech art scene” project, so that in case of a catastrophe, the art could revive again as one of the human culture pillars.

The project has a form of a “shelter” with artists placed in it (drew from participants of the 3rd Prague Biennale) in order to preserve the rare set of creative genotypes and traditions, so needed for the humanity. The project aims to present the ideological concept of the shelter and the way it will be used by its chosen inhabitants, who will define the route the art will take after an apocalypse.

The shelter is divided into five spaces marked on the floor. Each room has four artists, two men and two women, “living” in it. Their presence is signaled by sound installation (voices of 4 curators of the 3rd Biennale). Screenings using art works of the artists form an integral part of the project. The exhibition is accompanied by motives, displayed on walls in places where the imaginary space of the shelter meets the real space of the gallery. The motives present predictions, scenarios, problems and solutions concerning the apocalyptic visions of the end of the world.

Exhibition is supported by VŠUP and AVU

MeetFactory  Artists in Resindence Exhibition and Open Studios 
exhibiting artists
Anouk Kruithof (NL)
Aukje Koks (NL)
Hajnalka Tarr (HU)

Open Studios
István Csákány (HU)
“Wednesday, Meatloaf Day” (NL)

opening on Wednesday June 3rd at 7pm
music by: Data Live, www.myspace.com/datalive, playlist: Vasil Artamonov
4.6. - 19.6. 2009

* Open Studios
open only on Wednesday June 3rd from 7 pm or by appointment
contact: István Csákány +36702980410, “Wednesday, Meatloaf Day” - Walter van Broekhuizen +31628415143
Presentations of Dutch artists are part of the Festival of contemporary Dutch culture NethWorks.cz.

MeetFactory Artist-in-residence program has been realized thanks to the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Fonds BKVB, Visegrad Fund, Goethe Institut in Prague and Czech-German Fund For The Future.

INÉRCIA
An exhibition by Alexandre Estrela
Curated by Natxo Checa

opening May 1st at 7 pm
exhibition runs till 30th May 2009

www.alexandreestrela.com
www.marz.biz/artistas
www.zedosbois.org

Exhibition is generously supported by Directorate-General for the Arts/Ministry of Culture Portugal, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Instituto Camões in Prague, AV media

special thanks to Jiří Kotrla

As a follow up to the researches explored in previous shows “Radiação Solar e Forças Cósmicas” and “Putting Fear in its Place”, Alexandre Estrela establishes now a bridge between the behaviour of the images and its own perception.The search for natural inertias in the moving image, the retribuition and recognition of its phisical properties , the autonomy of the images and perceptive illusions, are the starting point for Alexandre Estrela’s regular indoor research. These problematics are now transfered to the open field, to the capturing Nature.

Starting from a group of mobil art residencies proportioned by ZDB and followed by Natxo Checa, the show we are presenting here is a new trail, a sort of a challenge proposed to Alexandre Estrela, that will end with a show in Lisboa.

Still waiting for other exotic destinies, the MeetFactory is delighted to present the ideas resulting from the first journey spent in São Miguel’s Volcano located in the Portuguese archipelago of Açores.

To obtain conditions of presenting an image considering its animicity, the one that repticiously hides behind its integrity, we shall establish an ultraperspectic(1) methodology, obligated to identify the points of tension in the image’s resistance to manipulation as in the inertia points of Nature.

In this possibility we present another knowledge announced by nature: the fall to a new dimension objecting to linear, rational, and cartesian apprehension, originary of human experience.

(1) Neologism by Professor of Physics Otto Rössler related to Endophysics literally means “physics from within”. It is the study of how the observations are affected and limited by the observer being within the universe.

Experimental audiovisual programme to close ENTER 4 festival Saturday April 25 from 8pm

General accessibility of audiovisual technologies allows anyone to become an experimentalist in music or moving image. Audiovisual performances thus offer a way to implement original artistic concepts, make political stands or just fulfil childhood dreams. But do these interventions have any real impact on the development of contemporary audiovisual forms? Or is a conceptual use of available audiovisual tools just an at-hand camouflage? Whatever the answer is, it is impossible to neglect or underestimate them as they massively proliferate the Internet and give expression to enormous enthusiasm and endless visions.

Line-up
SILVER CAMOUFLAGE
Rudolfo Quintas (PT)
Jack/Jack (SK/CZ) feat Philipp Quehenberger (AT)
The Trons (NZ)

PINK CAMOUFLAGE
2 Singles (CZ)
Moduretik (CZ) & VJ Kapaj (CZ)

BLACK CAMOUFLAGE
Yarrdesh (CZ)
Groupe Guma Guar (CZ)

OPEN STUDIO
Antena (CZ)
start from 10pm

Festival Enter4 pořádá CIANT - Mezinárodní centrum pro umění a nové technologie
www.ciant.cz
Enter4.org

Evolution Night is co-funded by the International Visegrad Fund.

SILVER CAMOUFLAGE

Rudolfo Quintas (PT)
The evening will start with an audiovisual performance Burning the Sound about the nature of rituals and the relation they establish with the state of power and control. It is uses the fire from lighter and matches to subvert patterns of rhythm, “exorcising” the sound as a spiritual strategy. The project was awarded at Transmediále 2009 in Berlin.

Jack/Jack (SK/CZ) feat Philipp Quehenberger (AT)
Czechoslovak “noise positive” duo Jack/Jack will present their own approach to a specific type of experimental music called “no-input music”. Their music is created using only 2 mixers and cables. It shows a decadent beauty of the digital echo. Noise, drone, bangs and beats hidden in the machine show that this minimalistic approach results in unexpectedly rich soundscapes. There will be a keyboards virtuoso Philipp Quehenberger (Mego Editions, Cheap Records) joining Jack/Jack with whom the duo just completes a common album.
www.myspace.com/jackjacknoise
www.myspace.com/philippquehenberger

The Trons (NZ)
In the world of electronic music a relation between technology and acoustic instruments has been a theme for quite some time now. Coming from New Zealand within a European tour, the Trons are an original solution to the theme. They are a robotic garage rock band, completely self playing junk robots. They are made mainly from recycled and salvaged parts, and play standard guitars, drums and keyboards. Their musical influences include the Clean, Velvet Underground and similar indie bands.
www.myspace.com/thtrons

PINK CAMOUFLAGE

Moduretik (CZ) & VJ Kapaj (CZ)
Moduretik is an emerging talent Jan Jiskra. In his pretty personal sets he combines several electronic genres including 8-bit and IDM. The visuals will be produced by Kamila Pajerová aka VJ Kapaj. Her main interests are vector graphics, animation, and generative art.
www.myspace.com/moduretik
www.myspace.com/kapaj

2 Singles (CZ)
“Left by not good girls - now on the right side of friendship. Every girl listening to their music knows better about boys’ heart then those who did that big mistake! ” Czech boy band performance is all in playback mode. However, the artists are multi-talented personalities. Petr Marek is a film maker, actor and musician (MIDI LIDI, decadent theatre Beruška, Muzikant Králíček). Jiří Havelka is a theatre director and actor (Divadlo Ypsilon, Dejvické Divadlo, VOSTO5).
www.myspace.com/2singles

BLACK CAMOUFLAGE

Yarrdesh (CZ)
Young multi-instrumentalist Yarrdesh is no novice to Czech alternative scene, especially thanks to his undertakings with several bands such as “Un Cri Bleu”. His sole electro set is a psychedelic mix of break-core rhythms finely tuned with samples of dissonant piano and noise fields all in all well packed in his neo-metal aesthetics. www.myspace.com/yarrdesh666

Groupe Guma Guar (CZ)
Closing the night, Prague based art activists collective Guma Guar will give a music voice to their system critique and media world irony. Since the founding in 2003 they have used audiovisual performances to make a political stand. They take part in international shows as well as illegal freearties and streetart projects. www.myspace.com/groupegumaguar, www.gumaguar.bloguje.cz

PERFORMANCES

BURNING THE SOUND BY RUDOLFO QUINTAS
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This quote by Arthur C. Clarke applies well to Burning the Sound, a performance by young Portugese artist Rudolfo Quintas combining high technology with one of the earliest tools used by humans - fire. Over the thousands of years this element has not lost any of its magical, mesmerizing qualities. With all our current knowledge the behaviour of flames is still beyond our control and understanding. The performance amplifies this chaotic energy, taking us back in time to a moment when we would gather around a fireplace to witness to shamans. The custom software instrument developed by Quintas is so well designed that all of the involved high technology seems to disappear, bringing into focus the live performer and his skill of ‘playing with fire’. The work is both compositional and performative - both technical and expressive. Quintas’s own presence in the work drawing the audience into the light of the flame leads to a kind of exchange - a kind of visual and physical ritual. The lighter functions as a kind of paintbrush that can carve out sounds from the air that fire is fire is constantly eating’. - Transmediale Jury Statement, Berlin, February 2009

Rudolfo Quintas (1980) is a Portuguese born visual artist, performer and interaction designer who seeks to expand the horizons and language of contemporary art. He explores domains of gesture and motion analyses, computer graphics and electronic music, often related to augmented reality. His research into the body as interface has been a fundamental element in his work frequently formalized in performance and installation art. His work is published in: ‘Younger Than Jesus: The Artist Directory’ co-published by the New Museum New York and Phaidon (2009 USA), TEDANCE book published by FMH (2009 PT), Taide Art Magazine (2009 FI), Performance Research (2007 UK) and ARTECH (2005 PT). He was awarded at Transmediale 2009, Future Places 2008, and Inter.Faces 2005 and has shown his work in conferences, major galleries and festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Holland, England, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, Mexico, Turkey and the USA.

THE TRONS & GREG LOCKE
The Trons are a robotic garage rock band from Hamilton, New Zealand. The band explores machine made music in a fun and engaging way, while investigating the unique musical possibilities and the psychology of human-robot interaction. Built mainly from salvaged and junked materials the Trons play standard guitars, drums and keyboards. The control system comes from a decommissioned vending machine that has been reprogrammed to drive the solenoids and motors that power the artificial limbs. These limbs and fingers are made from recycled construction kits and other second hand materials. The use of these flimsy mechanical components introduces subtle variations to the playing that seems to mimic our own performance style. The precision computer timing combined with the loose mechanical execution creates a band that is musically tight yet has elements of randomness and subtle superimposed rhythms. The Trons have been designed to tour and perform like a normal human band. The members have names, and audiences often relate and refer to them as people. The loose anthropomorphism is partly an outcome of designing mechanical devices to play instruments that were originally intended for humans, but is also due to our own mental projection of bodies onto these skeletal figures. This playful visual element of the band combined with the familiar construction materials helps break down the barriers we as humans often feel towards robots. The playing of fun original pop songs too makes the Trons a group that is as endearing as they are entertaining.

Greg Locke is a musician, artist and electronics engineer from Hamilton, New Zealand. Early projects included explorations into sound reproduction, music and artificial intelligence. While performing in bands he toyed with the idea of creating robotic musicians to add a precise yet colourful dynamic to the sounds. Work in the field of mechanical automation also fuelled these ideas, and a few experiments soon led to the construction of a complete band. Greg is currently artist in residence at Time’s Up Laboratories in Linz and is touring Europe with the Trons through the support of Time’s Up and Creative New Zealand.
www.thetrons.com

ANA3V3A-50Hz BY PETR KRUŠELNICKÝ AKA ANTENA
http://xxantenaxx.blog.cz/

Open studio:
You are invited to preview a new project “ANA3V3A-50Hz” which is an analogue audio-visual installation of three video signals (animations) in a process of transformation into audio.

Antena is an independent international art collective founded in Prague in 2001. From its original focus on nonverbal and experimental theatre taking part in various site specific projects and collaborations with Grotest Maru (DE), Big Art Group (USA), Recto Verso (CAN), the collective is now interested in new media and technologies. It also deals with light design, VJ-ing, audio productions and audiovisual installations. In 2003-2006 Antena was based is Berlin while organizing meetings of artists who are interested in experimental music, video, and sound installations. With Mangrove Kipling (FR) initiated a group “TV Print” and in collaboration with Salon Bruit organized “Noise NoD” session in the Czech Republic.

Petr Krušelnický (1977) aka Antena graduated from Duncan Centre dance academy, studied with Prof. Ctibor Turba, was a member of Divadlo mimů Alfred ve dvoře and of Grotest Maru (DE) theatre collective. Among other projects he was involved in creation of a performance by Mino Tanaka as well as of 3W Griftheater. He is interested in audiovisual projects in the area of analogue electronic media.

ADAPT! (part one)

opening on Saturday18.04 v 19:00
+ AV performance  - VENZHA CHRIST (ID): CHRONICLE_THERAPY!

An exhibition about light, electricity and other kinds of energies, known and unknown

exhibiting artists
ŠTĚPÁN KLENÍK (CZ), RUDOLFO QUINTAS (PT), JAN-PETER E.R. SONNTAG (DE)

curators DARINA ALSTER (CZ) & PAVEL SEDLÁK (CZ)

exhibition will run till 25.4.
free entry

Opening hours:
Saturday - Sunday15-20h Wednesday - Friday11-17h

Festival Enter4 pořádá CIANT - Mezinárodní centrum pro umění a nové technologie
www.ciant.cz
Enter4.org

THINGS TO BURN BY RUDOLFO QUINTAS
This interactive audiovisual installation is a new work from the series ‘Memory of the Future: Looking to the Past Never Ends’ that includes the awarded performance “Burning the Sound” (2008) and “Inversed Metaphors” installation (2008).

In “Things to Burn” (2009) participants are asked to burn elementary 3D figurative objects until its total abstract transformation. This action is perceptually achieved by the use of fire from a regular match as interface to modulate, animate and lighten the 3D objects - as an adventures dialogue between the poetics of form. In spite of something being destroying, it is creating. The contradiction is that what is real is destroyed, but what is digital is created, and the attention goes to what is created instead what is destroyed. “Things to Burn” reverses the perception of an object being burned: When a match starts to burn and its wood is being destroyed it makes a digital shape to upsurge in an organic way. Its duration is the one of the burning match. While one grows the other decreases. The participant controls his action, but is the fire that determines the time of its experience, generating an ambiguity in the idea of a participant controlling an action.

JAN-PETER E.R. SONNTAG: WARDEN SPRITE (RAUM #2)
Based on inventions and ideas of Nicola Tesla, explorations of Selim Lemström in the late 1880th and the actual NASA and ESA research on SPRITES - transit luminous events in between the tropo- and ionosphere - and their radial echo in extreme long frequency natural electromagnetic waves Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag is going to transform live atmospheric plasma data into ultrasonic modulated air and high frequency electrical AC- fields in the space which let fluorescent tubes glow. Selim Lemström built up the first and only machines on a mountain in Lapland that creates artificial induced aurora borealis.
“The sky is a great dome of hard material arched over the earth. There is a hole in it through which the spirits pass to the true heavens. (…). The spirits who live there light torches to guide the feet of new arrivals. This is the light of the aurora. (…) The whistling crackling noise which sometimes accompanies the aurora is the voices of these spirits trying to communicate with the people of the earth.” - E. W. Hawkes reported about the “heavenly regions” of the Inuits in his book “The Labrador Eskimo” from 1916.

SKETCH WALL: PHOTOLUMINESCENCE BOARD BY ŠTĚPÁN KLENÍK
The project is influenced by author’s interest in the phenomenon of the photoluminescent and fluorescent materials. These materials (PTL-photoluminescent) need minimum energy to glare. They are basically accumulative glaring self-charging batteries.

Draw it! Write it down! Make confidence… The room, in which the foil is tightly attached to the wall, is darkened. The foil is basically a big picture, an outsized canvas. A visitor / spectator obtains a torch with thin but strong ray of light before entering. The torch is substitution for brush - it is unique light brush painting. A spectator entering the room is able to paint or write with the brush / ray of light on the very canvas (PTL- foil). She is a co-creator of the work. Her supposed perception is deepened by the experience of the actual participation / creation. She has the opportunity to leave her own print in the sacred place of the gallery. It is not only passive interaction based on the movements or sound made by a visitor that brings to life an action or some kind of pre-programmed mechanisms. Also it is not any random generative process. You create!

ASPECT OF ILLUMINOSITY: First divine creation was Light… Let there be Light! In the materialistic but also spiritual sense Light is elementary quality. The game of light cheers up. A spectator has unrepeatable feeling while looking at the beam leaving luminous track behind it. It is all about discovering a game and its system. How to create with a ray of light? A spectator does not create only for herself, but for others, present visitors, and those who will come after she leaves. That makes a field for reaction: interception with previous drawings and messages. The canvas would never be full, because as time proceeds, a track of light would disappear, as the crystals discharge.

ASPECT OF IMPERMANENCY: The effect reflects another aspect of Kleník’s work, and that is its dependency on time: its flashiness and uniqueness. A drawer realizes impermanency of her draws, but also possibility of laminating these draws. The third dimension of the drawing/writing occurs - time. Particular drawings slowly disappear in the distance (dark); its fading into the background creates feeling of three dimensions. We see previous sketches disappearing. For newcomers they would be forever secret.

The author does not offer a clear message, concept or a thought: He lets the spectator participate, become a part of the work and enjoy herself. Kleník lets him co-create her own adventure / memory. Hence, language of art makes sense only when there is someone who understands it, or at least tries to decode it, in this case a spectator co-creates the actual language. She must understand it.

Czech, 1978, http://www.umakart.cz, studied philosophy of art at Charles University in Prague, currently a student of New Media Department at the Fine Arts Academy in Prague. His works mainly reflect the relationship between world of art and its consumers.

CHRONICLE_THERAPY! BY VENZHA CHRIST
Performance at the ADAPT! (Part One) exhibition opening
Saturday, April 18 at 7 PM

CHRONICLE_THERAPY! is a sound performance that explores the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition to television, radio and mobile phone signals, all other electronic devices send out and can be affected by electromagnetic signals. The same is true for humans and other living beings: we are always immersed in the electromagnetic spectrum that we have to adapt to.

The performance has been created in the context of the Education Focus Programme (EFP) initiated by Venzha Christ. The Education Focus Program (EFP) is a project conceived of in terms of a developing country where New Media art is currently not widely available. The main goal of the project is to build a modern conception of a future between technology and people. It thus includes activities and research focusing on people, technology, communities, and beyond. The EFP challenges people to approach their everyday environment differently.

Venzha Christ is a prolific artist and organiser based in Yogyajakarta, Indonesia. His projects involve a very intimate relationship with his environment, which he is dedicated to building and challenging at the same time. He has initiated projects such as House of Natural Fiber (HONF), Cellsbutton Media Art Festival and Education Focus Programme (EFP).

25.4. 20:00 MeetFactory

EVOLUTION NIGHT: CAMOUFLAGE
Experiments in sound and image

Line-up
SILVER CAMOUFLAGE
Rudolfo Quintas (PT)
Jack/Jack (SK/CZ) feat Philipp Quehenberger (AT)
The Trons (NZ)

PINK CAMOUFLAGE
2 Singles (CZ)
Moduretik (CZ) & VJ Kapaj (CZ)

BLACK CAMOUFLAGE
Yarrdesh (CZ)
Groupe Guma Guar (CZ)

The exhibition is being arranged by the artists Eva Jiřička (CZ) and David Kellner (Austria) together with Adrien Tirtiaux (Belgium/Austria).

opening on Thursday April 2nd at 7 pm, play list: Mark Ther
exhibition will run till April 15th

Two media and two topics actively transforming themselves will be mingled together at the exhibition. In Eva Jiřička’s video performance the exhibition space of MeetFactory is the topic of the conversation of two ladies who come here for the first time. They engage their ideas and life experience to present their points of view to the audience or to just entertain themselves while being in the gallery where they are also looking for the artist herself who called them up to the gallery.
Both David Kellner and Adrien Tirtiaux are visual artists interested in animation and comics. For this exhibition they are preparing a comic strip story which will be placed on all the six walls in each of the gallery rooms. The space architecture will become a real screen for the four-dimensional narrative which will repeatedly hit against the gravity with full power.

“Artist In Residence exhibition”

opening on Friday Feb 27th
++ Wladimir518 + 1A2V1: JAROHARO music /////// VJ KOLOUCH projection, StreetFighterElectro, www.myspace.com/1a2v1live ++

exhibition guests:
Jan Jaroslav Sterec, CARBUSTERS + AUTO*MAT

28.2. - 29. 3. 2009

opening hours Wednesday - Sunday 3 - 8 pm

The exhibition joins artists, activists, eco-designers and activist organizations. The concept of the exhibition works with the disposition of MeetFactory, which is an isolated building standing between a motorway and railway tracks. It is concerned with mobility and resource alternatives and utopian ideas.

Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser, live and work Berlin
www.folkekoebberling.de
Since 1998 the emphasis of their artistic activities has been the urban space as an experimental field. Köbberling and Kaltwasser worked on topics concerning the public sphere, surveillance tactics, illegality and self-organization. Up until now they have realized installations, exhibits and interventions in the urban space and thus attempting to question city life in the context of privatization and economization, to transform it through practical examples of temporary use and informal methods as well as to show possibilities for its enlivenment and repossession.

What they refer to as the “city as a resource” is a recognition of the value of impulse, communication, conflict, surprise moments and the quality of the free use of the urban public space. This includes, of course, leaving behind things for others. The recognition of the city as a resource and the use of public space in this manner is an objective of scorn for the proponents and stooges of the neoliberal and entrepreneurial privatized city and order fanatics. Both strive with all means available to eradicate the creative places, the free stores, the grey market economy and its visible structural existence in the city.

Miklós Mécs (HUNGARY)
http://mecsmiki.blogspot.com

Jan Jaroslav Sterec (CZ)

“I decided to write the text about my father not to describe an Art Brut artist unappreciated by the society but to describe the activities of an entrepreneur - a pioneer of irrational entrepreneurship. With Jan Jaroslav Sterec the installations, performances, architectonic and environmental visions acquired the shapes of commercial products and services. Without the support of state institutions and out of cultural context, Sterec seems to be an independent creator of sometimes very extensive projects. Having been influenced by an Austrian artist Hundertwasser, who operates at the boundary between architecture, ecology and art, Sterec started a company called Stowasser s.r.o. in the business euphoria after Velvet Revolution.Without having architectural, artistic or natural science education he designed and constructed garden houses, green roofs, botanical wastewater treatment plants, garden biotopes, composting toilets and many others.

The concept of Eco-Architecture in Sterec’s interpretation blends with Recycling Architecture. This seems to be a logical conclusion at the time of current excess waste production but it is often incompatible with the concepts of investors who seek the eco image scented with wood and soil. The use of alternative building materials was not motivated by the effort to reduce the costs (as it often might have seemed) but rather by the joy of experimentation and the consistency in the implementation of the ideological fundamentals. He insulated the tanks and roofs with the use of discarded advert banners, for creating green roofs he used waste ashes mixed with crushed polystyrene instead of soil. Garden houses looking like the amalgams of African dwellings and Sci-Fi buildings known from films emerged in several private gardens. What served as the material for their construction was just anything - from dried reed-mace to scrap freezers.

My father’s claims often remained unpaid because of the discrepancies between his and his customers’ views and in the course of those 10 years of the company’s existence it hovered on the verge of bankruptcy. Thanks to his persuasive powers Sterec kept on gaining new customers - he, for example, penetrated - in a guerilla way - into a TOP100 dinner party of the most successful Czech companies and he made a speech about his company, prospects of Eco-Architecture and handed out his visiting cards the same way as the other, invited participants.

While Sterec’s model - artist Hundertwasser, a signatory of a manifesto against rationalism in architecture, executed lucrative, kitsch and in its final effect not very special architectonic projects in Austria, Germany and the USA, Sterec’s Stowasser s.r.o. company offers houses which look like igloos built of potato sacks filled with keramzit or wastewater treatment objects in the shape of a teepee. He develops a project of a camping site on the roof of Lucerna Palace - a camping site in the centre of Prague. Chemapol company, one of the part owners of the roof, however, sent threatening letters to Sterec, which were motivated not by the dissent about the project itself but rather by the fact that they could not understand that the project was not a mere provocation against their company.

Nowadays provocation tends to be accepted by the society and the institutions as one of the artist’s functions, the attempts to shock are becoming a trade. However, the compliance with an institution absorbs and dissolves any excess from within.

I took part in several negotiations between my father and the investors and I could not help feeling certain envy - how much excitement, emotions and fuss (compared to my own artistic projects) was provoked by each slight change, each experiment made by my father in the course of an order execution, any “bonus” which was created on the investors’ grounds without their knowledge.

Stowasser company became more authentic and more independent than the artist by whom it had been inspired. The position of the company which is expected to generate profits in the first place was the best base for disrupting the rational petit-bourgeois world views of post-revolutionary profiteers. Also, incomparably more effective than the drawing-room, legalized activism of some of other artists. In 2005 the company ceases to exist.” text by Pavel Sterec

Artist in Residence program is generously supported by Goethe-Institut in Prague, Czech-German Fund For The Future and International Visegrad Fund.

Opening night: December 12 2008, 7 pm
Closed: December 21 2008 till January 8 2009
Last day of the exhibition: January 18 2009

“It is not known what was being extracted from the mine, it was probably only a prospectors‘ mistake.The shaft is 130 meters deep and there are several dead-end corridors branching out from it….” Pavel Sterec (25) draws mainly from a live performance in his activities. These are recorded and converted by a wide range of means and devices from photography and video to an actual object and installation. The exhibition is a part of the project „Gallery Warming”.

The project was supported by the Prague City Hall.

The Day Before Evening

The exhibition consists of five works equally arranged in broken space of a former boiler house - MeetFactory. There are two “pairs” and one solitaire work.

The first “pair” is a performance and installation called All Evening Star.

The row of cinema seats is placed close to a projection screen. The audience (performers) are sitting in the chairs and touching the projection surface with their palms while pressing their thumbs against their closed eyes – in this way pressure images occur – inner movie. (the performance is intended to be of full feature-film length)

Pressure images are visual sensations arising in an eye without the presence of light beams, being produced just by pressing against the retina. They were described in detail by Jan Evagelista Purkyne (1787-1869) who himself generated them in various ways and sketched them. He was interested not only in the exploration of the physiology of an eye but mainly in the theory of vision (A Subjective View of Vision - 1818)

Opposite the impromptu screen there are ten modified Rorschach inkblots displayed.

Rorschach inkblot test is one of psychological methods used for personality analysis. It is a projection test based on the projection of a person’s train of thought and personality characteristics on the vague images. Rorschach created hundreds of inkblots and finally chose ten of them which suit best for the personality test. I continue in the codification (in the field of vision) by simplifying the inkblots and turning them into images with clear outlines and primary colours.

The other “pair” consists of large-scale photographs of the dead ends of mine tunnels and an installation with a book. Mining in Přibyslav mine went on in the Middle Ages probably for ten years. Nobody knows what was mined there. In all probability it was just a mistake of the prospectors.

In the space a “book” is installed. The “book” consists of photocopied pages of all the books I own and have never finished. I tried to find the last page which I can remember in all of them.

The connecting line between these two “pairs” is formed by a video taken during the performance (carried out together with David Landa) – we fired a signal rocket out of a “Russian Wheel”at the moment we reached its highest point – transforming thus the observation wheel into a large Ó letter – an interjection expressing amazement - for a moment.

Opening on Friday, January 9th at 7pm + concert: SPREADING DREAD

10.1. – 15. 2. 2009

Opening hours Wednesday – Sunday 3 - 8 pm
This Exhibition is generously supported by Goethe-Institut in Prague, Czech-German Foundation of Future and Ministry of Culture CR.

Ben Cottrell

Jana Kochánková

Vladimír Skrepl

_____________________________________________________________

This Exhibition is generously supported by Goethe-Institut in Prague, Czech-German Foundation of Future and Ministry of Culture CR.

Opening Thursday October 27 at 7pm
Exhibition runs until December 12
closing party December 12 from 7pm

studio no. 22, 1st floor

Michael Gimenez (France) and Anders Grønlien (Norway) present the second part of their ongoing collaborative project, a full scale installation that completely surrounds the audience in an atmospheric riddle.

The work aims to isolate the environment of the exhibition space (light, sound, architecture, etc..) in order to model it as a specific material. The work is closely linked to stage design with clear references to popular science fiction aesthetics.

The exhibition “Hyperspace Module 1.0 – Playing With Space” had previously been shown at the AVU Gallery in February 2008 and the installation presented in Meet Factory is seen as a continuation of this work.

opening November 27 at 7pm
28.11. - 20. 12. 2008

Enrique Ježik’s works stem from conceptual premises based on his investigation of institutionalised forms of violence. He concentrates on issues such as migration, security, rationalisation and representation of war. To deal with them he uses different methods and media, from drawing and sculptural installations to video and action performances. Most of Ježik’s sculptural installations and performances carry social-critical overtones and are often politically engaged. He contrasts machines with their functions, uses heavy construction machines to pit them against each other in stylized duels and in the same manner he confronts guns with various materials.

Enrique Ježik was born in 1961 in Cordoba, Argentina; in 1990 he moved to Mexico City, where he currently lives and works. His work has been internationally exhibited, including Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes, Mexico City; Ex Teresa Arte Actual, Mexico City; MACO-Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca, Mexico; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France; M’ARS Centre of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada; Break 2.4 Art Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia; InSite 94, San Diego (USA)-Tijuana (MX); Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada. www.enriquejezik.com

The exhibition of Enrique Ježik is generously supported by: MEXICAN MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS (SECRETARIA DE RELACIONES EXTERIORES), EMBASSY OF MEXICO in Prague, CONACULTA (Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), METROSTAV a.s.

When you shoot in a gallery
Interview with Enrique Ježik by Tomáš Pospiszyl

He uses excavators, trucks and tanks. He creates drawings in the concrete floor of a gallery with an impact hammer, shoots against the walls with a shotgun. He took hundreds of machetes from the factory and gave them to the inhabitants of a Mexican village. He made an anti-riot unit to march into the audience at a performance art festival.

Where are you from?
Argentina, but I have been living in Mexico for 18 years now.

Why did you move?
I was invited to Central Mexico in 1990 to take part in a sculpture competition, then also in a symposium in Oaxaca, southern Mexico. I liked it there and I had my first exhibition in Mexico City one year later.

What was so interesting in Mexico that you decided to stay?
There are lots of contrasts and energy in Mexico which you cannot find in Argentina. Mexico City itself is an interesting and mighty city, enormous number of people who are always on the go. Also the artists‘ community there is very active and cosmopolitan. In comparison with Argentina at that time I found the artistic background there much more fruitful and lively. Something is always happening there.

Is Mexico City the leading artistic centre of Mexico or are there any other interesting centres to be found in other cities?
It is, but things change. One of very active places is Guadalajara City where there was a good international fair of contemporary art to which various exhibitions and events were linked. There are interesting artists in Monterrey and Tijuana in the north of Mexico. It is a large country and its cultural centres change places. In Monterrey itself there were two large museums of contemporary arts — one closed down several years ago.

How many galleries are there in Mexico City?
It varies. A lot of galleries work with young artists and they are constantly on the move.

At one of your exhibitions in Mexico you arranged for five trucks to back up into a gallery and dump the load of construction waste on the floor. As for your interventions - sometimes I am not able to say to what extent you react to the social context and what accent you put on the purity of forms. Could your works be understood as commenting on the social situation?
Yes, in different ways. You mentioned the exhibition which was held at the same time as an art fair and there were a lot of people coming. That’s why I took interest in creating this performance. I greatly enjoy situations in which various layers of the audience are mixed. An agressive intervention into the gallery space may carry symbolic meaning. I took part in an exhibition in Quebec province in Canada which is known for its separatist tendencies. I drew a map of Canada on the wall and simply cut Quebec out of the wall - trying to see how it would be after the secession.

When and how did you start to move from traditional sculpture to the works which emphasize process more than material product?
It was in the 1990s. But even before I used fire, for example in the eighties I let complete sculptures burn. I started to become less interested in objects. In 1997 I started to use video which I used to record actions.

Did you use heavy machinery at that time already or just electrical tools?
It went hand in hand. I had wanted to use machines a long time before, since the 1990s, but I was only able to get to it after many years. The problem was that a work made up of excavators can damage both the machines and the gallery so it is not easy to persuade companies and galleries to give consent to something like this. I finally installed the performance with two excavators with pounding impact hammers on their booms in an old church in Mexico City, the Ex Teresa Arte Actual art centre. I liked the space. Most of the projects which had been carried out there before were related to religion. I was glad to introduce something completely different.

How long did the performance with the exacavators last?
The exhibition lasted four days. During the first days the machines were controlled by the staff members of the company which owned the machines. The last day it was me and the gallery’s technician. It was a very important moment for me when I touched the levers and was able to control the machine by myself. I like doing anything by myself - I do not want to have assistants create my works for me according to my instructions.

The performance with the exacavators draws attention to force and anti-force, it is an absurd metaphor of self-destructive balance. If you carry out your interventions by gun firing at a gallery wall, particular symbolic meaning cannot be avoided. The function of guns is to do harm, to kill.
That is unavoidable. A gun is used if there is a conflict. And that is what I am interested in. Work with guns is as demanding as work with building machinery. The idea of riddling the wall with bullets occured to me a long time ago but there was nobody who would let me do it right in the gallery. So at the beginning I just showed videos of me shooting somewhere else. At last I was able to carry it out at the gallery of Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France. The organizers - crazy people, anyway - called the police to give them advance notice of the performance, just to be sure. But the police was not at least interested even though it took place only a few hundred metres from a prison. They said it is Hunting Union that is in charge to give permission. Every country has its own system. In England anything like that would not be possible. I was at a residency there once but none of my projects was realised because every time it was banned by someone because of some absurd safety measures.

What kind of ammunition do you use?
It depends on the type of the wall. Preferably bullets which can make as big holes in the wall and break it as much as possible. That is not easy to estimate. I fired at a wooden hut in Russia with a Kalashnikov rifle and I thought I would shoot it to pieces. But the bullets had such speed and force of penetration that they went through without destroying the wood.

Do you own your own gun?
Yes, I do.

You have been working in Europe more often recently. How does your work reflect your Mexican experience?
I am interested in what is happening in Mexico but I like to generalise a lot. I definitely do not want to convey the idea that there are too many guns and too much violence in Mexico City. But my work may be influenced by Mexico - by the fact that society there is not bound by rules as much as, let’s say, in England. Thanks to Mexico the idea of working with a gun or an excavator came into my mind; in Britain I would probably find other solutions. Mexican chaos is compensated by more freedom. Life in Mexico City brings you to a specific understanding of what is and what is not possible to accomplish.

October 24 - November 20 2008

plakát / poster: advancedesign.org

MeetFactory presents the 3rd incarnation in the ongoing development of the installation State of Delusion by Erik Olofsen. The first part was on show in September in Bilbao Arte in Spain and the second part is on show until October 26th in P/////AKT in Amsterdam.

State of Delusion is built in close consideration toward its surrounding environment. Measured, studied, re-arranged, the space is this artist’s canvas. The walls are slanted to give a false sense of perspective. The optical illusions, the distorted images, the play of light and shadow generated by the projectors, make crossing the exhibition hall a new sensory, almost dizzying, experience. Erik Olofsen has worked very intensely in the last few years developing the idea of the physical and conceptual artificiality of constructions. His works manipulate the physical space that houses them with walls and wood, video projections and other perceptual means. Olofsen deconstructs the room. Everything is used and incorporated as part of the experience, including the exposed supporting structures at the rear of the very walls which (mis)guide the viewer. The visitor’s own shadow forms part of, yet blocks the view of the landscape, which is in fact a video. The bewildered viewers feel artificial in an artificial construction: bewildered to find that not only are they caught in a trap that is foreign to them, but that they actually form part of it. It’s like in those films where the amnesic lead character suddenly realizes at the end that he/she is the callous murderer, the cause of all the suffering. The victim stands in as judge, who is also a police officer and, to add a further layer of perversion, the perpetrator.

Erik Olofsen(1970) lives and works in Amsterdam. He studied at the Rietveld Academy and was an artist in residence at the Rijks Academy. His works usually integrate different medias such as sculpture, architectural elements, video, photographs and sound. Different elements and disciplines are combined as fragments that reinforce each other. Olofsens works are shown in numerous international exhibitions and he has received several awards, namely the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2003, the Spanish international Vidalife.08 in 2005 and the Golden Cube for best installation at the Kasseler Documentarfilm und Videofest in 2007.

The exhibition of Erik Olofsen was supported by Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Prague and Mondriaan foundation.

Doppeldenk: Andreas Glauch (*1969, Germany) & Marcel Baer (*1976, Germany)

Francois-Thibaut Pencenat (*1982, France)

exhibition of MeetFactory´s artists in recidence
2. 10.–5. 10. 2008 / opening October 1 + DJ´s: Disko 69 & Credit 00

galería parásito/MeetFactory Gallery 3. 9. 2008 - 28. 9. 2008
conception: Silvina Arismendi, Joaquín Luzoro

participating artists: Javier Hinojosa (Mexico) / Ignacio Gumucio (Chile) / Joaquín Luzoro (Chile) / Francisca Sánchez (Chile) / Nicolás Sánchez (Chile) / Pier Stockholm (Peru)

Goal of the Galería Parásito project is to introduce works of contemporary Latino artists and curators to Czech audience, but also to establish active cooperation between Czech and Latino artists and curators.

Participating artists will stay for two week in the studios of the MeetFactory and create new art works in the gallery space.
The artists will have a ‚carte blanche‘ to create and experiment in the gallery as they wish.
The purpose of this exhibition, is to let the audience an inside look on how contemporary Latin artists work, by opening the gallery space the public during the residence period.

This exhibition continues with already realized project “Correo Domestico” (domestic post), which was realized in autumn 2007 in NoD Gallery. This exhibition also had mainly to introduce Latin American art to Czech audience. Czech-Mexican exhibition experimental project was arranged by the Harto espacio organization.

plakát / poster: advancedesign.org

FMSW [FallerMiethStüssiWeck] & Dušan Zahoranský
exhibition guests: Pavla Sceranková, Matěj Al-Ali, Kateřina Hadravová, Venuše Tesnerová


opening July 24 at 7 p.m.
25. 7.-24. 8. 2008

plakát / poster: advancedesign.org

links
FMSW
Dušan Zahoranský
ČT24 / Czech Tv
Artyčok Tv

Exhibition and residency of FMSW was generously supported by Goethe-Institut in Prague and Czech-German Foundation of Future.

curator: Karel Haloun:

20. 6.–27. 6. 2008

participating artists:
Joska Skalník, Miroslav Jiránek, Michal Cihlář, Robert V. Novák, Petr Krejzek, Klára Kvízová, Aleš Najbrt, Zuzana Lednická, Martin Němec, David Cajthaml, Tomáš Brousil, Petr Bosák a Robert Jansa, Vladimir 518, Michal Škapa, Jakub Hošek, Jan Havel…

23.5. - 15.6. 2008

plakát / poster: advancedesign.org

The theme that is worked by Isabela Grosseová is derived from an estimation how many regional and state art galleries (or art museums – as they are often renamed) there are in Bohemia and what is their programme. Grosseová focused on institutions associated under the Gallery council – Rada galerií (www.radagalerii.cz), that have except the exhibition programme a “collection role”. It means they have certain responsibility alone with the fact their work will be evaluated in the future, as it is not time-limited. Practically none of these galleries define which contemporary art seems interesting for them – except monitoring the “quality” in art – and what are their ideas and visions. Galleries often excuse their current vagueness saying that they have to complete gaps in their collections.

Isabela Grosseová decided to work with last 5-10 years exhibition titles, which have very often poetical character and are full of imaginary messages and metaphors that form quite a big part of all these exhibition titles. Such as – Imaginary world, Studies and tenures, Vertical forms, Fascination by the unseen, Visual concept, In the inward whirl, Extinct forms, Soul of the space, Dialogues with matter, Concentrated perspective, Emotions and form, World of silence and fantasy, Nature in glass, Centripetal edges

The exhibition was constituted by three separate and related works.

“Titled” is an audio work based on titles from exhibitions held in Czech State Art Galleries and Museums in the period after 1989. The titles are recorded in alphabetical order and provide the listeners with the option to imagine and reproduce the exhibitions though thein respective titles, with their own associations and imaginary projections.

The work, “Confession” brings to this triad what is less articulated in “Titled” and “Wheel Spinning Revolving Impossible To Contain Centrifugal Collapse From Periphery” (See below). A more mundane description of the everyday and economic, confronting the tendency of ephemeral and poetic escapism in the other works. This obvious overlapping from communist times, which can not be contained any more, are negotiated around a real estate space of 75m2.

The installation “Wheel Spinning Revolving Impossible To Contain Centrifugal Collapse From Periphery” is a sculptural work from the potter’s turntable which in its failure to keep the premeditated form, collapse and can not contain what is intended. This work can only be seen with a portable electric spotlight, available for the audience.
This gives the public a participatory duty while at the same time visualize another element of the installation; namely the individualization of points of view and limitations in scope. This work may be perceived as complementary both to the “Titled”, which in its linguistic essence are containers or markers of whole exhibitions and the “Confession”, which is more a illustration of the failure of continuous inclusion in a broader sense of society.

Confession: Property

March 5th 2003 I bought two apartments. The apartments were sold under the condition that the tenants living there could stay. Those tenants have been living there for years and they have old contracts with indeterminate duration and state regulated rent. Apartments were offered for sale by a private real estate agency called PSN. Both apartments are located in the same house, on same floor. It is possible in the future to join them up. One apartment is inhabited by the family of Mr. Rybin, who himself was born there. In the second apartment lives Mr. Vagenknecht, whom I have never met, and all administrative issues with me is communicated through his girlfriend, also living there. The flat was given to Mr. Vagenknecht by the state, sometime in the 1980’s. About a year before I purchased the apartments, most of communal property were offered by the state office to be bought by the tenants.

Family Rybin and Mr. Vagenknecht either had no money or believed that the price of rent will not rise. They preferred to remain as tenants for the future. Most tenants in this particular house become self-owners and joined the Union of Apartment Owners. Meanwhile, in the country, the rightwing political party ODS grew steadily more powerful and the deregulation of the communistic rent system became a political issue. I hoped as well for a soon commercialization of housing, thus being able to use the flats for myself.

For both apartments, I paid in total 770.000 Czech crowns in 2003. Being the new property owner I started to charge rent and since 2006 I boosted the price by approximately 30% per year, based on the normative advice by the Ministry of Finance. The girlfriend of Mr. Vagenknecht is sending rent regularly, while the family Rybin is in minus since 2003 with the amount of 12.000 Czech crowns, approximately four months of rent. I wrote them seven letters asking for money. Then I got to know the following regulation: If a tenant owes more then three months of rent payments, the owner can by law cancel the lease. Based on this legal formulation I sent Mr. Rybin a notice of eviction. After a week I visited the family Rybin. They expressed disfavor for leaving the apartment. They settled up the debt and entered a lawsuit. I registered in the Tenants Association, where they offer to both parties juridical counseling. First court hearing in this lawsuit will proceed this year.

Prague April 9th 2008, Isabela Grosseova

S názvem / Výběr názvů výstav, které proběhly ve státních galeriích a muzeích umění v období po roce 1989. (Zvuková nahrávka CD 60 min. 2008)

Titled / Titles are selected from exhibitions held in Czech State Art Galleries and Museums in the period after 1989. (Audio CD 60 min. 2008)

názvy / titles

10.4. - 14.5. 2008

Igor Korpaczewski´s exhibition is an attempt to synthesize different forms of expression and as a result get close to a simple artwork “poem” from important “words” in given conditions. Connection of figural painting (right on the wall) with several fine installations and interventions uses industrial character of MeetFactory while respecting the fact, that it is in the same time a gallery of contemporary art. It is another attempt of this author to manipulate painting by deteriorating limits of this medium language, working with image, space, light, and movement.

plakát / poster: advancedesign.org

Project WAKE UP! doesn’t have a homogenous story, but separate artworks are chapters/examples, to which that appeal in the title refers. Nevertheless it is possible to join most of the works, when not narratively so semantically. This appeal is at the same time commented – the theme is ironized on one side by using symbols, signs, kitsch – among others with the knowledge of limited impact of art on the society; on the other side (by using paintings as instruments – posters, murals) the theme is getting closer to the visitors. Formally these works are on the edge of street art, already mentioned murals, and classical painting. Each of three MeetFactory Gallery rooms has a different character – street/factory, gallery, and garage.