CONTEMPORARY CZECH VIDEOART AND FILM IN VISUAL ARTS

Artists: Karolina Breguła (opening) / Vladimíra Večeřová and Petra Lelláková / Alžběta Bačíková / Dalibor Knapp / Barbora Švehláková / Barbora Kropáčková / Pavel Jestřáb / Markéta Magidová / curator: Markéta Jonášová

The MeetFactory screening of films Fire-Followers and The Soup by Polish author Karolina Breguła opens a series of one-time presentations of the contemporary Czech video art and film as part of the visual arts. The unifying motif of all the videos is capturing certain staged situation, by means of which the artists open up a dialogue with a specific place or event.

9th July – video performances will be shown resulting from the co-operation between Vladimíra Večeřová and Petra Lelláková, titled You Cannot, a follow-up of an older cycle of works under the common name You Can. Both artists have placed their videos in a landscape, which serves them as an inspiration and also as a framework for their mutual interaction. In the resulting images, the originally real characters turn into fantasy, creating by means of their activities often even grotesque examples of belonging between the figures and the landscape. Petra Lelláková is a student and Vladimíra Večeřová a graduate from the New Media II studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

6th August – the film by Alžběta BačíkováTalk & Twerk will be shown, where two seemingly different forms of public self-presentation are being confronted, the rhetoric and the erotic one. A twerk professional dancer and a rhetoric teacher meet before the camera eye to discover connections between at first glance very different forms of art by means of mutual instruction. Alžběta Bačíková graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, studio Painting II.

3rd September – the film by Dalibor Knapp, called The Set. The leitmotif of the film is movement – at first movement of the character, which is the subject of the narration, then the movement of the camera and later still the movement of the scene itself. It’s not only the forward movement, but also backward one which makes the viewer reassess what they have seen again and again, judging anew also the very possibilities of the film medium to capture reality. Dalibor Knapp graduated from the Theory of Culture at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University Prague, and studies at the Audiovisual Studies Center at the Prague FAMU.

24th September – video by Barbora ŠvehlákováK tekutosti klienta (On the Fluidity of a Client) will be screened. It is a visual essay based on a critical reflection of a training method called ‘Symbolic Modeling’ and used to enhance labor efficiency of corporate employees. Symbolic modeling originates in the therapy method of ‘clean language’, consisting in posing an exact structure of questions filled with phrases used by the client. The video is based upon a transcript of a dialogue that uses the ‘clean language’ method; at the same time the dialogue is confronted with empty pictorial metaphors from Internet databanks. Barbora Švehláková is a student of the Intermedia Confrontation studio, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague.  

21st October – we present the video by Barbora KropáčkováBuďte stateční (Be Brave). Barbora uses intense pictorial memories to return to an unchanged environment of a child sanatorium showing how the sanatorium environment and its domestic rules formed experiences of several generations of children staying at a similar type of institution. Barbora Kropáčková is a student of Interactive media studio, Faculty of Arts and Design, Ústí nad Labem.

18th November – a video series by Pavel Jestřáb will be shown, called Křik kohouta (Cock's scream), shot during the artist’s stay in Thailand. The subject matter of the videos is folklore ensembles’ abroad tours done in order to present the folk culture of Slovácko Region. Pavel Jestřáb, proudly wearing Slovácko national costume, brings into a variety of mostly sacred places of the Thai culture glimpses of traditional rites performed in Slovácko villages in the course of the year – we witness a Christian divine service given at a Buddhist Temple, or horse riding at a beach under the Ape Mountain. The videos are part of Pavel Jestřáb final thesis, defended at the Intermedia Confrontation studio, the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague.  

21st January 2016 – final film Překlapy a přehmaty (Typos and Stumbles), shot by Markéta Magidová in an administrative building of a former utility company. The film’s main character is a dancer representing different types of women applying for a job interview, each of them having their own style of speech, outfit and gesturing. The stress caused by the tense situation keeps growing and is projected in the dancer’s movements. Wrong grips, foot faults, falls and other ill movements out of control are connected with a verbal comment – reading out textual materials related to the job interview. However, those contain misprints, which challenge the emotional tension of the whole situation, undermining the seriousness of the whole admission procedure. Markéta Magidová graduated from the Video studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Technical University in Brno, and from the Theory and History of Design at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague.