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MeetFactory, o. p. s.
Ke Sklárně 3213/15
150 00 Praha 5

GPS souřadnice:
50.053653
14.408441

Otevírací doba:
13:00 do 20:00 + dle večerního programu

Curator´s Text / MeetFactory Gallery
Amplified by the Stillness

24/11 – 28/1/2018
Opening: 24/11/17, 8pm
Artists: 
Das Numen, A/A (Andreas Greiner & Armin Keplinger), Felix Kiessling, Julian Charrière, Markus Hoffmann
Curator: Eva Riebová
Exhibition proposal: Jaro Varga
MeetFactory Gallery

I am very pleased that the MeetFactory is presenting, for the first time in the Czech Republic, a group work of the Das Numen collective, as well as individual pieces from its members Andreas Greiner, Felix Kiessling, Julian Charrière and Markus Hoffmann, and also Greiner, in cooperation with Armin Keplinger as the A/A artist duo.

I am even more pleased because it is hard to have all of these artists in the same place at the same time. At the moment of this project’s beginning, one of the members is preparing his new project in the icy plains of Greenland, another is getting ready for a trip to a recently closed uranium mine in Southern Bohemia, yet another has just returned from New Zealand where he sank a metal pipe in the ground, later to place its other end in Spain, exactly at the opposite point of the Globe and thus symbolically intersecting the world, while his colleagues keep working at their studio labs in Berlin examining explosive processes as a starting point for new projects.

The artists’ encounter in one place reminds me somewhat of the principle along which the collective work Das Numen Meatus, a dominant of the whole exhibition, functions. Current weather conditions from various ends of the world are being transferred into the darkened gallery space by means of online data access from the respective wind stations, with the help of an algorithm, and an air machine, which makes suspended organ pipes resonate. Thus the art gallery offers, in a figurative sense, a temporary “testimony” of the state of our planet.    

The artists mentioned work with the globe as if it were itself an art material. Or, more exactly, as Das Numen state in their portfolio, the Earth is a fundamental element of the artistic process:  “We see phenomena originating from nature as co-authors. Such a relationship harbors equality and respect, but also dependencies and the necessity to act sustainably“.  

With a balanced measure of pragmatism and poetry, the artists translate biological systems and chemical processes into aesthetic objects.  Yet there is something disturbing in this carefully conserved beauty. As if the minimalist aesthetics aroused expectations of a sort of big bang. The peaceful atmosphere of the exhibition space is accompanied by a creeping sensation of an imminent threat, which, taking into account current discussions of our planet’s changes due to human activity, cannot be ignored.

The exhibition’s title Amplified by the Stillness thus refers not only to the moment when, thanks to calming down and meditating, our senses get stirred.  It resembles nature that gets calm before the first rumbles of an approaching storm. From this perspective, our sensation turns rather bitter while observing the black anti-sun, pictures made by means of radioactive particles, of plants frozen in bloom, artificial stones, and, also, if we let ourselves go and interpret freely, the metal pipes remind us of the existence of the winds.   

Eva Riebová, curator


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[1] Das Numen, statement
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Open daily from 1–8pm and according to the evening program. Free entry.
Contacts:
Libor Galia  → PR manager  → +420 732 566 667 → libor.galia@meetfactory.cz   
Zuzana Kolouchová → PR specialist → zuzana.kolouchova@meetfactory.cz


MeetFactory is supported in 2017 by a grant from the City of Prague amounting to 10.000.000 CZK.

CT_Amplified by the Stillness.pdf