Matej Pavlík

About:

Matej Pavlík most frequently works with medium of photography and video. Currently he tends to address the form of short experimental documentary.  The author sees documentation itself here as searching for poetic symbols in reality together with identification, that symbolically could be violent. Similarly he used the apophenia  as a method of documenting for his short film Masking Captivity. While within the film relations and images could be questioned since their meaning refers to apophenia as a symptom of paranoia or schizophrenia, the author sees apophenia rather as some “ability” to organize happening beyond ourselves.

Matej Pavlik's work dwells within artistic and curatorial practice. Together with visual artist Lucie Rosenfeldova, he prepares a series of exhibitions for gallery Etc. in Prague, which carries an umbrella theme “The Right to an Image and Visibility of Protest Movements.” Particular exhibitions will focus on how to grasp protest images more critically and imaginatively within their own distribution, and so react to a delusion of emancipatory potential of social networks and other platforms for sharing audiovisual materials.

Matej Pavlik is one of the initiators and artists working on a long-term research project on psychotronics and parapsychology in the Czechoslovakia. The project has already resulted in several happenings, exhibitions and texts, and explores what the authors call “esthetics beyond senses”. Currently the working group approaches the field of dowsing and healing of 70s and 80s and explores the processes the healers and other scientists used to cure both public and private space of Czechoslovakian citizens with as well as define what could have been pathological there in the urbanistic scale.

Education:

In 2011 starts at Academy of  Arts Architecture and Design in Prague at Photography department of Aleksandra Vajd and Hynek Alt and later in 2017 graduated as Master of Arts in a same studio but by heads of the studio Aleksandra Vajd and Martin Kohout.

Selected exhibitions:

2018 – Conditions of Impossibility VII/VII: The Psychopathology of the Planet, Kurzor gallery,
2018 – Telepathology and parapschygoegraphy, online artwork at Atalk.cz,
2017 – To Live With Ghosts, Jeleni Gallery,
2017 – Hand-Antennas: Protocols from extrasensory aesthetics, Josef Sudek Studio,
2016 – A Different End of the World is Possible, Výzkumný ústav Vodohospodářský,
2016 – Agent, Fotograf gallery,
2016 – Follow to Construct, 209 gallery,
2015 – Magic Because I Speak, A.M. 180 gallery.

Date of residency: 1. 4. 2019–30. 6. 2019