Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny č. 36
| Author: | A group of authors |
| Year of publication: | 2024 |
| Publisher: | Academy of Fine Arts in Prague |
| Language: | Czech |
36. The Art, Theory and Related Zones workbook brings together a rich variety of genres and topics.
In the issue’s first text, entitled The Politics of Intimacy. A Discussion of the Relationship between the Private and Public Spheres in Czech Art of the 1990s, Kristina Láníková shows what specifics the reception of second-wave feminism may have encountered in this country. While the approaches of Western artists were carried by the principle of "the personal is political", in Czech art of the early 1990s, intimacy, on the contrary, became a tool for depoliticising the personal.
Polish scholar Michalina Sablik, in her English-language study Hybrids. Trans-corporeal Performances at the Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin in the 1970s, focuses on selected performances by Polish artists who already in the 1970s relativized the boundaries between the human body and more-than-human beings or technical apparatuses.
An even more radical questioning of the boundary between one’s own body and its environment is dealt with by Lenka Veselá in Notes from the Endocene. The author introduces a new concept to capture how moods or emotions are increasingly influenced by biochemically manipulated hormonal processes that are the product of the pharmaceutical industry.
Essay In the expanded field. Notes on Art, Agriculture and the Countryside by Kateřina Konvalina Žáková compares the author’s experiences from the central Bohemian community and organic farm Jednorožec and from the Inland project in Asturias, Spain, which is based on linking agro-ecological farming with contemporary art practice.
In February this year, the Hungarian art historian Edit András visited AVU. In an English-language interview, which we conducted on the occasion of the launch of her first Czech book, she responds primarily to the cultural policy of the Viktor Orbán regime. In contemporary Hungary, the authoritarian legacy of the state socialist regime is intertwined with new methods of surveillance and power hegemony, including the use of commercial interests and incentives for political ends.
The aforementioned publication Cultural Cross-dressing. Art on the Ruins of Socialism and on the Peaks of Nationalism (Hradec Králové: Gallery of Modern Art 2023) is reviewed by Tomáš Pospiszyl, who argues that the book could inspire a scholarly publication on the history of Czech art after 1989.
The last text of the issue is another review – Vojtěch Märc discusses the anthology Mapping the Moving Image: Media, Actors and Places in the Czech Environment (Prague: National Film Archive 2023), edited by Martin Mazanc and Sylva Poláková. Here we also encounter a reflection on a certain hybridisation, this time in relation to the medium of the moving image.