 is here with us. So welcome to everybody who has joined us on Facebook and here on the webinar on Zoom. This is the first visiting artist lecture this semester. My name is Brani Salakuburovich and I'm the program leader for MA Fine Art here at Prague College. And our guest for the first lecture now is Hinek Alt. Hinek is a visual artist working across media from photography, video, object installation. He's also the head of the Department of Photography and New Media at the Film Academy here in Prague. And I'm really grateful that he accepted our invitation in this weird digital world in which we now coexist as little boxes on screen. But I think he is very familiar to this kind of a world and works with it with a lot of elegance and is very with person to start this spring series of talks. So Hinek, welcome. I will only give you a few pointers for the lecture. You can please do start like whenever you have a question for Hinek, please just type it out either in the chat or in the Q&A here at Zoom on Zoom or in the chat on Facebook above the live under the live stream. Hinek will present his projects one by one and we will have us time for a brief kind of breather in between where I will for sure be there to ask some questions and also relay any questions from you so that we don't do this is this kind of lump some lecture which doesn't really work online. So yes, please do that and then at the end of the lecture we do invite you. We would like to invite everyone who is on Zoom into the call. So it is enough to just raise your hand and let us know if you want to join us at the end of the lecture and we will be here for you. Okay, so I think Petr Knoplow who is the other organizer of the VALS series is joining us but we will now actually disappear from rescuing both of us and let Hinek take over with his talk. So as soon as Petr comes so that we make sure he can also he doesn't find himself lost in this digital world. He's still connecting. He's still connecting. He's in the car coming from Burma so connected. Yeah, okay so fine so we can I think as soon as I disappear Hinek you will be there. Please start, bye. Okay, thank you very much for this very warm warm introduction. Thanks a lot for inviting me. It's an honor. I would also like to say thanks to Prague College for doing this. I'm not sure. I think Brannislava was very optimistic about my abilities. I as everyone else I'm just trying to cope with this sort of communication so it's definitely not going to be flawless. I do have the experience of teaching online unfortunately but I'm still learning and I'm trying to understand what the capacity of this sort of online presence is. I guess capacity in in a sense of time and how much how much one can actually share in terms of the content and sentiment and some sort of legibility. I've decided to present a couple of projects that to a certain extent overlap or their common traits for all the projects. So as Brannislava mentioned I work across the media. I would also say that my practice is sort of understood as something like a wide practice so I use a lot of media but also the teaching practice I consider part of my artist practice. I also tend to organize say events. I'm very much into post-production or intermedia practice. I'm kind of fond of working in a say in a wide territory. Nevertheless the projects that I'm going to present are all projects that were intended either for gallery or theater and I consider them fairly traditional projects. The first one I'm just going to share the screen and I'm going to talk over the screen. I think Brannislava I'll need your assistance because it seems that the Zoom webinar won't let me do anything now. Okay I'm talking to the Victoria who is running the Zoom call so she needs to do this. It worked when we tried it so let's. Yes, exactly. Now it seems it's completely there. Okay I can do it now. Okay sorry about that. So the first project I'm going to show is actually it's a collaborative project with Alexandra White. It's from 2011 so it's quite old but I've intentionally sort of went into archive. It's a project called You Can't Change the Weather and I think in the context of the talk it has a couple of important points to me. So it talks a lot about understanding photography as Brannislava mentioned photography is for me one of the crucial media but it's always a photography in a distance or sort of understanding of photography as a medium and very often as a self-reflective medium. So this project is strongly relying on a certain reflection of the medium itself as one of the points. The other point is the other important point I suppose is the collaborative nature. So the whole project was conceived in a sort of dialogue. For me the dialogue is something that runs through all the other projects. It's an important quality dialogue usually generates a third entity someone. It's not necessarily a synthesis of two artists but it sort of generates completely different kind of thinking. It obviously causes a lot of friction but then usually the friction becomes fruitful in a sense of coming up with entirely new solutions. It obviously demystifies entirely the idea of who is actually pressing the shutter or who is the artist behind the camera. Who is the one who is actually deciding what it is. It sort of strongly relativizes that and for me that is an important element. The whole project as you can see is a series of images inspired by weather conditions. We sort of used a book from Brian Odarte. The book is called Inside the White Cube. It's a seminal book on thinking about how a white cube as a gallery emerged from say 19th century salon. So salon being something inhabited being part of the living space is something that not only served to show the art but it also served for meetings. And Odarte is sort of observing how the phenomenon of white cube something dedicated entirely to showing art how that emerged. What kind of qualities this actually required or what became the qualities strongly associated with the white cube or presentation of art in white cube. It is interesting not only as a sort of thinking about just a gallery principle but it's quite interesting to watch how the white cube became both extremely democratic in a sense of accessibility and isolated. Isolated in a sense of being as much closed off from the environment as possible. So Odarte is talking about the white cube having a specific quality of using the artificial light having floors having no windows I mean the floors need to be either hardwood or soft material to dampen the steps. Back then in 2011 we decided to actually reverse this process and we turned the gallery into a studio. So we actually closed the gallery even further. We turned it into a sort of photographic makeshift studio and we took inspiration from cinematographic effects of making different weather conditions whether it would be clouds or snow or rain I guess sunrise sunset strong wind. We're kind of interested in creating very simple obvious situations that mainly used cinematic effects always quite simple ones but these effects produced quite convincing results in a sense of the appearance of the images. So we're quite interested in the in the simple trickery of how you can not necessarily fool the viewer but how you can work with the viewer. Every picture is a sort of it's like a rabus or yeah. The idea behind the weather originates in the thinking of Doherty. So it's talking about this or it's thinking about an isolated entirely isolated space where weather has no place. So white cube is an environment that doesn't actually get influenced by the weather conditions whether it's a storm outside or it's sunny it doesn't change the way the artworks look in the gallery. That was definitely a starting point but then obviously there was an element of control. We were kind of intrigued by this idea of human confidence to actually change the weather whether it was intentional or now as we know we've managed to change the weather. So the whole idea was or the whole sort of discourse we had was about how much you can create new weather or how much you can create conditions that you imagine or plan. The whole project that I'm showing now actually resulted in a booklet or a small book containing I think 32 images so you're looking at the whole project as it then concluded. We've then exhibited the project only in a form of the book so the book was shown as a pile of books in the middle of the gallery and it didn't use the gallery anymore as an exhibition space it was more like a point of distribution. I think the strong idea behind this was that it's no point to exhibit these images as images anymore they can just right away become part of the catalogue. They were made in the gallery and we can exhibit them already as a printed material as a conclusion. I would like to switch to another project now. Okay so this is much more recent project. This is a project called Avatar Z. It sort of evolved over time and it sort of took shape last year. What you're looking at is a documentation from a performative lecture which we did at Studio Hirgino, an alternative theater space where we created this sort of simple stage design with a sort of dominant video projection. I think I need to run through the background of the project. The core idea or the sort of core work behind the project was a research project that we did together with my friend, an extremely interesting artist, Martin Zett, who started researching his father's estate sometime prior to that. The work of Martin Zett's father, Miloš Zett, is something quite untangible, quite uncontainable. It's a large group of finished sculptures, models, sketches. It's large in quantity but also in the mass. Miloš Zett was a sort of prominent social realist sculptor who was active from late 60s all the way to early 90s. So he entirely dedicated himself to the role of socialist, realist sculptor. He only worked for public space. It was an artist who was not interested in exhibiting in galleries, were together with architects. There was sort of shaping the urbanistic extension of institutions. So usually his sculpture pieces were part of a sort of larger context of institutions or something that you would call now a public infrastructure, so hospitals or shopping clusters, theaters and so on. So he used throughout all his career, he basically used something that we call now late modernist language, something that evolved over time, but it always sort of sustained traces of, say, progressive sculpture of the turn of 19th and 20th century, but also with traces of sculpture, say renaissance, depicting materials or shapes in an extremely illusory fashion, something his career would be now described as mastery, something quite physical where one needed to be extremely skillful. So the whole project started as an inventory, as a sort of overview of this whole estate, which is now extremely difficult to institutionalize. Obviously he's got really interesting works and some works that are not so interesting or perhaps not so interesting. So the whole estate as such is an interesting case of burden, something that really sort of weighs down, it takes a lot of space, it's hard to negotiate with so after we've done sort of inventory of the whole thing, we were trying to to come with another step in the whole process. So we've started talking about sort of creating a lecture or perhaps an angle, new angle on the whole, also ideological issue, and we came up with an idea of lecture with strong elements of performance. So something that we now call performative lecture where the information is present, but the performative part is sort of dominant. So we've expanded this whole idea of the lecture into an augmented life video feed that was projected, now you can see it on the back of the stage. I'm just going to play a quick trailer, I'm sorry that trailer is in check, but I think it's not necessarily about the content of the video, it's much more about, so I'm just going to play a little trailer and then I'll come back to it. I think I didn't share the sound. The camera and the camera with the child became a part of the series with the same of course, as a correct meaning or a sign. For me, this cooperation was really interesting from the point of view of that I realized how many years ago I was in the form of a formally thought-provoking space. Z has never thought about his plastics as a independent entity. So basically what you saw was a trailer for a recording of the whole lecture. We're still in the process of finishing a full-length recording, it's got about an hour and it's going to actually sort of follow the whole lecture. So basically what you saw was a trailer for a recording of the whole lecture. We're still in the process of finishing a full-length recording, it's got about an hour and it's going to actually sort of follow the whole lecture. The whole lecture was trying to sort of pass on a lot of information in terms of the practice of Miloš Zet, again someone who was strongly associated with certain ideology, with certain political system, who identified actually with that. By doing that I think we were trying to sort of reflect on the complexity of the critique. I think we were trying to try to see how we can be less critical to his position and much more interested or intrigued in certain strategies that we found quite interesting. I guess the main one was the discussion of the public space, so something that we feel strongly as something contemporary, something quite important and strongly associated with privatization of public space and also certain ambiguity of the term itself. Another important element was the sort of gamey idea of the augmented reality, so what you saw was a live feed of the lecture with the sculptures turning alive, obviously just for the duration of the lecture and also having sort of voice. I think it was somewhere between a Czech children story for television and Hollywood, somewhere quite in between, so something that was for us technically quite challenging, but obviously the result is more sort of schematic, so we kind of enjoyed the idea looking through that effect or being quite able to distinguish the layers of reality in that. The case of Miloš that sort of provided me with a lot of ideas or some material that I became intrigued with and I sort of continued actually working with some of the elements. I'm just going to show now the, so this is an installation I did actually in similar time, so it's about a year and a half ago, and then it's an installation within a group show in Bratislava at Zahoryan Van Espen gallery. The whole concept of the show was actually sort of a revisiting 1960s in back then socialist Czechoslovakia. I've borrowed one of the models of Miloš for this installation and I've used a strategy of deconstructing a photograph. I've sort of borrowed images from newspaper. I was researching how sculptures are transported when they are being removed, this being quite often the case of Miloš that's sculptures. Nevertheless, I haven't actually taken a specific case of the sculpture removal. I was much more interested in the aesthetics of the of the bandaging and wrapping of the sculpture itself. I was interested in the act of lifting the sculpture in the air while protecting it from being sort of squeezed, but obviously tying it together as if in a bondage or a similar practice. I was really intrigued by this dichotomy that I found on images of sculptures being transported and I'll try to reconstruct it. It's like a reversed photography where the journalistic images were just an inspiration and I've actually worked in the area of sort of an object or an installation I suppose it's a it's not necessarily an object. For me it's quite important to actually then because the object doesn't exist anymore it was just for the duration of the exhibition. I was really curious how this actually keeps on living then again in the documentation of the exhibition. So now we're actually moving on to yet another project. This is a sort of connecting element so it's an image that I've taken in the storage. This is a still life of the storage filled with Miloš's sculptures. So as I was really intrigued by the juxtapositions that occur sort of naturally without interference, without any kind of intention, it's basically just models and sculptures piled up and they create this super multi-layered composition that I was just documenting. Anyhow they pictured and became part of an exhibition that actually opened last October. The exhibition as a whole is called How Soon Is Now. It's using four different projects sort of rotating around an idea of hard and soft infrastructures. What I'm showing now is an image of installation of another research that I did in an archive of the City Gallery of Prague. So I was more and more interested in this idea of removing sculptures from their original place. I have found all the documentation images that I could just in the City Gallery Archive. I was interested in seeing how much one institution of what's the volume of the sculptures that the institution takes care of. So this is an installation of actually a display that I'm going to now show. It's an e-ink display. It's something that we know from e-books like Kindle. I've used the raw parts of the e-book together with a colleague of mine. We've created this presentation device that shows about 30 images of the sculptures being removed and transported. Again I was really interested in this aesthetic layers that this whole act creates. Of course it was also filled with the rich layers of ideological content. It very often was really old sculptures that were transported to say a pediatrium or storage to be protected. But some of them were quite ideological. So they would be from 50s, 60s, 70s. It was really a mixture of all sorts of reasons why these sculptures were removed. In the same moment I was interested in creating a continuous presentation or a slideshow where these sculptures just coexist. I was also interested in isolating them from the environment. So I've used something that I call digital collage. They are cut out roughly from the environment. This e-ink display gives them a completely peculiar materiality. As we know, the e-ink display is a physical display that has the capacity to actually change from black to white. But it still is a physical display. So it has this weird sort of feeling as somewhat in between newspaper and computer screen. Now I'm showing documentation of the whole exhibition. Again it's an exhibition that was open just last October or last November. I'm showing some of the documentation shots. You've just seen one sort of smaller project that was part of it. That was the sculpture in the air on the e-ink display. Now we're moving to another project that was part of the same installation. It was a video called Untitled in Rackets Spable and Ketamine. I'm just going to play a couple of minutes of this video and then I will talk more about this. So perhaps I can keep it running another while and I can just talk about how this whole work started. So I feel like it's a synthesis of a lot of the strategies that you just saw. I guess it's important to say that what you're looking at is a puppet that was created in 1920. So 100 years ago by Joseph Scuba who was a puppeteer. He sort of designed the character called Spable who was supposed to in a grotesque way reflect on a character of a townie, a slacker who is very old-fashioned. It's trying to, I suppose, reflect on the 1920s sentiment against the 19th century. The guy is sort of dumbwitted. He's often a target of jokes without realizing. He was later accompanied by a character playing his son, so it was a smaller puppet. I think it was, throughout the history, it was an extremely popular puppet that was continuously sort of losing any kind of content. The joke was sort of draining itself out and essentially now it's a puppet usually used in a children place. I think it's sort of marginal. So I was curious in attempting at some sort of emancipation of this character or maybe sidetracking the clear situation that he's confined to or he has to live in. I guess I was kind of critical about this idea of ridiculing or scapegoating someone as such. So I came up with the strategy of actually becoming myself the puppeteer, again using a 3D motion capture device that would allow me to actually move the puppet just by moving myself. So the puppet essentially repeats my movement. The idea that I had was to try to disconnect the strings attached to the limbs and head of the puppet and sort of naively I was trying to free it from its fate while knowing that this is going to fail but I was interested in seeing what kind of result it's going to produce if I metaphorically cut the strings of the puppet by infusing myself in ketamine which is a recreational drug originally anesthetic for farm animals now quite widely used as a recreational club drug that mildly cures depression has a very mild after effects and it renders the user quite sort of absent in a sense of losing the notion of the space and time around. So I was trying to sort of disconnect myself while being a puppeteer disconnect myself from the role of controlling the puppet. The puppet then stares as you can see because it's repeating my own movements it sort of blankly stares into. I was trying to think about the metaphor of say wild animal that was captured for a long time and then it stares out of the open cage once it's being released back into nature and it sort of doesn't trust the freedom it's looking at. I'm not sure if this is all quite part of the work but this is definitely a thinking that went behind my. So we're looking at a small portion I was basically trying to exhaust the whole time that I was intoxicated I was trying to use all the hour and 40 minutes while the effects until the effects sort of wore off. So it's quite a long boring video where nothing really happens. We can stop the sharing now. We can slowly move to the last two bits of the presentation. Only while Hineck is preparing these last bits are we kind of let you talk for longer because it was just really interesting to see the differences in the continuation of projects but if people do have questions please start putting them in the Q&A or the chat and then as soon as Hineck finishes we will go into the Q&A but I think there's no need to break. Yeah I think we have another six, seven minutes ahead of us in the presentation. I'm back again coming to the How Soon Is Now exhibition sort of floor plan. As I said the spable video was part of the installation as well as a large series of images that are called Untitled Infrastructures on the Beach. Coincidentally in the same moment we've published a book which I would like to be sort of conclusion of the presentation. In the meantime I think it's good to mention that I started the presentation with the images of the weather in the installation or the project that was inspired by the Oh Doherty's Meditation on White Cube and I'm sort of concluding with the shots of the exhibition that is currently closed. Of course the exhibition was opened only for a week or 10 days and it's still on even though you can't see it. So I think we're finishing at the point where we're looking at another extremely isolated gallery. It's not necessarily democratic but it's definitely quite isolated. So the last project is a book um oh I can't do this sorry I need to cancel. So it's a book called Untitled Infrastructures on the Beach. It's a book that we published in the same moment as the exhibition was open. The book contains about 60 images of holes in the street. It shows pipes and cables, earth being dug up. I was for a long time or always intrigued by the situation is the French movement of the 70s for two reasons in particular to this project. So they've devised a method called Derivan called Purposeless Exploration of the City. So a walk through the city which has no aim, no purpose. It's about looking and experiencing the city. I guess enjoying also not having the aim or target or finish. I've used this method as a way of finding these holes in the street. So the holes emerge without being announced. There was no method of finding these holes in the street by researching. It's I'm sure it would be possible but it would definitely be more complicated than actually going out and blindly finding them. But there was another layer that I sort of took from the thinking of situation is from 70s and that was the idea of the beach underneath the pavement. So entirely different reality being right underneath the pavement. The pavement being a sort of metaphor of the structure of something solid or something that could be cleaned. And the beach being something quite organic and I suppose filled with enjoyment and leisure and free time. And I think they I was interested in these images to actually discover yet another thing and that was the the visible so-called hard infrastructure. So all the pipes cables are not necessarily a beach but they are like a physical physical veins that actually bind us together. So I was and they are the reason why the city for example works. I have for the book I have invited four writers to work with the images and to use them as sort of projection screens. I feel like the images are quite generic. They could literally mean anything. And I was curious to see or to hear what the what the writers could actually elaborate while looking at the images. So inside the book there are four individual texts or actually five four and a half. I've invited Angelus Meralda who is a curator. I have invited UC Parica, a media theorist, Yen Kratochiel again who's a curator and who kind of helped me put the edit the book together. And then we found Gianfranco Sanguinetti who's actually part of who was a part of the original French situationist movement from 70s and who happens to live in Prague. So we've invited these four people to reflect on the on the on the images. And I would like to read one text from Angelus Meralda that I feel is quite critical and quite precise. Eschism in the earth reveals the arterial network that binds us into one human organic compound. The hummus or soil made of decomposed vegetal and animal matter is our only lifeline. It is true that a treasure lies buried in the ground but it is not gold, it is filth, it is our sustenance, our survival, and our mutual dependence. We continue to live according to a de-arranged value scale distorted by a society that values gold above ground and that has tipped the balance by extracting what lies below in order to burn it and release it into the fragile atmosphere. What we have found here is a buried treasure. These pipes keep us clean and healthy. In a society focused on a game of appearances, the underfunded and ill-equipped infrastructure of hospitals and morgues has exploded in the face of self-aggrandizing modern European society, a society that values the appearance of wealth on altars rather than the sustainable balance of preserving what lies below. The book reveals the hidden intestines of an urban leviathan, biological connections between community members run deep through the ground. The oddly positioned and often precarious looking materials of our underground sewage system are momentarily revealed as the arterial flow of our lifeblood, flushing our pestinential mass and providing fresh running water. The sudden opening of the ground reveals not the gates of hell, but the underappreciated workers, engineers and mechanics who provide the sanitary basis of our drinking and washing water each and every day. The soil might be made of dead organic matter, but we rely on it for our lives and sustenance. It is our safety net. What lies beneath the unsightly, the perverse, is what keeps us alive. In our contemporary game of mirrors, a capitalism that looks for quick fixed solutions, we have yet to overcome our aversion to the method that sustains us, that which keeps us alive and is hidden from the frames of the city. This book serves as a portion of its elevation into that which is framed, elevated and presented far away from its hidden subterranean holes. It is an aesthetic framing of that which was never meant to be open, but is nevertheless an integral whole. So I think I'm going to stop sharing the screen and I think that's it. Thank you. Super. Thank you so much. So what we want to do now is invite people in if this kind of works. If not, we will just start the Q&A and hope some questions will come up in the chat or in the Q&A box here on Zoom or on Facebook. So if you want to come in, raise your hand. I hope our webinar organizer will let you in. If not, we will just start this conversation. So thank you very much for the talk. I think it actually really works well seeing the projects one next to the other rather than isolating because as you said yourself before we started in a way the NOD gallery exhibition which is now happening in this weird public but forbidden space is going back to that exhibition from 10 years ago where the gallery again became weather producing magic ritual kind of space but not accessible as as a physical or public space necessarily. So like there are so many things that come up but one I want to start with is that I really like this kind of overt emancipatory gesture that comes through in this project. So there's an emancipate or emancipation has had a kind of a bad vibe that goes together with the socialism that since the 90s has been a difficult one to deal with but there is a really interesting kind of return or reclaiming of this idea of emancipation of both memory but also of this of figure of a puppet or the individual or the infrastructures so could you is it something you feel is important? So yes I think there's a portion that is very rational or very conscious something that I yes I suppose I am interested in strategies of emancipation but maybe also plainly paying attention to ordinary I think so I feel like oppression is quite often hidden behind the ordinary and I think this was the title of the lecture was the infrastructures of the obvious and I think so I'm extremely interested or intrigued by looking at how things work and whether whether they work differently if we just look at them from a different angle so that would be the sort of rational part but then intuitively of course I'm I think there's always a layer of politics in whatever we do even if we go shopping it's a it could be understood as political so there's no way that we can sort of tear away certain political strategies but I think I'm not trying to be optimistic at all I'm absolutely curious much more in sort of intriguing certain or triggering certain certain change of perspective and I'm not trying to absolutely work with political content but I'm kind of curious how this political content emerges anyway so that for me is quite quite interesting how the how the the layer of politics whether it would be historical or contemporary always appears so it's yes sometimes it's more subtle sometimes it's it's quite obvious obviously if you work with a socialist realist sculptor it's you're right away there but I'm not trying to we're not we're not trying to build a monument for this guy we're much more trying to really dissect or sort of analytically think about what what how he functioned as a as a sort of from an artist who was fully engaged in in certain ideology yeah so that in a way you would say that emancipating really is more about being able to see through these surface realities then absolutely absolutely yes yes yes yeah okay we have the first guest here with us I think Christy if you want to ask a question you know for everyone to see you please turn your camera on as well oh yes I I'm not sure how okay never mind then just ask ask ask one we can hear okay um so uh you mentioned this kind of your other new perspectives on on artwork again because I I started first thinking of what you do as an institutional critique but you also you not only offer perspective new perspectives on the kind of surroundings that the white cube the institution but also on the perspectives art and artwork has had artists have had in themselves um and I was interested in the first the weather artwork series uh because I saw some of my favorite artworks were in in this photography series you have the the Nimbus clouds by I think Bernhard Smidl then you also have the rainbow artwork by Olafur Eliason I could recognize in this series of whether is it on purpose um was it on are you referencing other artworks in this series or was it kind of coincidental I'm completely yeah um thanks a lot for the for the question so I feel like there are two layers to the question one was about the institutional critique so I I suppose with the with the weather project you could say that that was definitely kind of from yes the aftermath of the institutional critique and I think um I always found the strategies so kind of um inspiring but I'm I'm not sure that the core of my practice but I I don't want to interpret myself but I I would never think that my practice would be based in in institutional critique but it's definitely strongly influenced by some of the strategies so I would um yeah I would be honored to incorporate it into my vocabulary um and then um I think um the uh Olafur Eliason or the clouds references uh I think not not necessarily in this particular project in in some older works especially in this collaborative um dialogue for example with uh Alexander White we did reference other works strongly not necessarily in this project so I think it's it's more sort of intuitive or maybe coincidence um and I think we were sort of drawing the inspiration directly from cinematographic effects and I think we were kind of interested that there is this film studios that are quite often rented out um internationally um and also the special effects are quite well established the check um special effects um um engineers or whatever you call these guys um are um are quite renowned so we we actually googled um and we were looking up uh uh tricks and uh recipes on how to do uh certain effects uh so it was much more um much more sourcing out um uh added um practical um say um field okay but um um thanks for uh seeing uh seeing some other works there which I don't mind at all thank you thank you okay uh we wait for other questions I'm gonna ask another thing that I really like or at least kind of pick up on or like to think is is coming through is this idea of a third entity uh you mentioned it uh as uh as what kind of starts existing in the friction of collaboration but in a way there is a third entity also in the avatar uh project or there is a kind of is there maybe some more fruitful thinking that can relate other projects to this yeah absolutely I think it's a it's an important element and I think something um also um um in teaching um um we are sort of functioning as a as a team so and this is something uh super intriguing for me or super um uh fulfilling uh I suppose that um um I feel that with a any kind of engagement in in in um in a collaborative um um project you you start developing this third entity and um it's it's I suppose it's it's quite hard to predict what the what the nature of this third entity in each case is going to be it obviously varies and it produces um as I said at the at the very beginning and it always any kind of collaboration produces a lot of friction so it it produces a lot of a lot of sort of say problems but I suppose that's that that's exactly the starting moment of of sort of new new perspective on things and I think this is where the dialogue or multi-log in in some cases becomes interesting and it's also quite interesting um in um for example in avatar z it um it was definitely that because we were a large group of um um sort of research group of um say six people but of course with with different um level of engagement um some some people only had um sort of um very specific roles um and um some of us were much more interested in the big picture um but no one none of us knew where this project is going to actually go and I think this um that was kind of interesting so the third entity and also a common goal um which is sort of shifting or glimmering somewhere um off the um off the visible horizon is is definitely um an interesting moment for me yeah thanks yeah I really really like the how it kind of worked into the aesthetic into the dynamic of how things end up being it's really nice to see okay I'm gonna keep asking because people are quiet it's this webinar format is weird for everyone I think so so there's no kind of real connection or need to ask the question so um I I want to maybe go back to this idea of public space of a space of a gallery or um yeah I yeah so so to think I mean it was it was cracking for a second can you can you hear me now not really yeah yeah I think the internet is I think it's mine probably I don't know okay it was a bit sorry yeah it's fine I was just thinking maybe to to to return to this idea of the public space of the gallery first of all but public space in in more like with your book the halls in the street are the infrastructure of the public space as well your exhibition is now locked in something that should be a public space it's not uh I went out just before the start of the talk and the street is not really quite the public space because we are like strongly regulated in our behavior and isolated so how do you kind of think the public space in relation to your work here like is there is there something that is that is an ongoing concern or is it just my reading which is also possible yeah thank you this is super interesting question but I'm I'm afraid I have no clear answers so I'm as much concerned as you are in terms of what's happening now it's really it's really sort of weird or hard to process so what this like in in the case of the closed galleries what this is going to how this is going to evolve I'm sure that for a lot of institutions this is going to be a fundamental blow in a sense of really um struggling to sustain after we are hopefully going to pull ourselves together and get vaccinated or yeah so um I guess yes I am I am definitely interested in the in the modes of public space so um for example when we were talking about the um uh Melon Z or Avatar Z project um it's it's about um sort of trying to understand what is what is it really the public space between buildings in the city to what extent it is really accessible to everyone and then um uh I'm not necessarily interested in working for the public space so I'm not an a street artist or I'm not someone who who would like to have sculptures and um on the corner um um in that respect I'm much more interested in this sort of democratic nature of the gallery so that the gallery is not um is a closed space that isn't um producing visual smog it's not trying to it's not trying to interfere with everything else it's uh it's not a billboard uh um sort of shouting out it's it is uh it has a certain um voice um um and by uh entering the gallery you are sort of you are you are entering also the dialogue with the with either the institution or the the works that are displayed there so I am I am super curious about that I'm in in respect to what's happening now I have no idea what kind of effect it's gonna have I'm curious I'm I would love to invite everyone for my sort of closing of the exhibition on Tuesday next week at eight we're gonna stream um music from the gallery so we're gonna sort of create a listening session with um audiophiliac music sort of equipment for the for the exhibition but I feel like this is an extremely naive gesture so I think it's an attempt to sort of um organize something that is again intended for this uh online environment and I think everyone is oversaturated with the online content and everyone is desperately craving physical presence physical yeah um so I um I tend to be optimistic and I think again the gallery is going to be crucial for a gallery is going to be crucial for meeting other people and hopefully I am I'm not too optimistic so I um yeah maybe where is the stream from the so it's gonna be an Audi Facebook but it's gonna be streamed I think to YouTube but the link is gonna be on an Audi an Audi Facebook yes yeah so so for everyone who wants to join it's on Facebook it's the NOD gallery yeah we're gonna announce it um um um I will be more than happy to invite you for the for the event and you can share it with everyone yeah we can also share it on this event on Facebook for people so yeah whoever is not too oversaturated is welcome to join we do get one uh question from a student uh saying thanks for an interesting lecture and sharing the great art and not to fear who are your favorite artists from the past who inspire you yeah it's always a nice question so you're gonna stay another hour yeah I don't know how to yes thank you for the question um yes it's always um um uh so uh there are many yes um hmm and it keeps changing I uh I suppose I'm uh yeah I'm trying to keep discovering but in context of what I was showing I think uh it's good to mention um Felix Gonzales Torres so it's late 80s early 90s Cuban artist who lived in in us um he was active in New York um he um he sort of reflected a lot on the idea of or on the back then extremely unfortunately present the HIV crisis um and um uh he has devised some methods that I uh feel are extremely alive still today so he worked among other people he worked with posters um and with the idea of um sort of um natural distribution of the work um so that's uh that could be one that I uh highly appreciate uh I'm thinking what's the someone who's more um um uh I really like um at Atkins um um he's um a young guy um um English uh artist who lives in Berlin uh he works with 3D with uh certain poetics that I um that it's hard to maybe I can just um type it in actually yeah I think our young students actually do know him but maybe not uh you know them yeah so just type in the names and people can look yeah atkins uh so it's a guy who works um um who sort of fuses poetry and uh and 3D uh 3D animation uh in an extremely interesting way I would recommend to go and see uh the um the show that is currently on in the Rudolfinum it's called the Compassion Fatigue is Over uh part of it is uh is a great array of artists um um um among them uh it's uh Jeremy Shaw which I really like it's a guy who now uh works um with um with sort of contemporary um Rachel's um uh mainly dance parties and um um sort of drug in you in drug induced um um um changed uh um consciousness um um I think that's uh that's an interesting guy um I I really like um uh Yoko Ono uh for some uh seminal text pieces um uh and also um I think she um she she was famous only through one song as a musician but I think it's a brilliant song and it um it worked as really really strong again a manse patore tool on a uh on a American club scene in 80s um it's called uh Walking on Thin Eyes just this song uh but of course I like her as an artist mainly um um I I guess I really like uh Marqueta Otova she mainly works with photography I think she's brilliant uh oh it's just it's double A it's a mistake so she is she is really competent in using the photographic language I think she is like she's really master so that's maybe someone from uh from the local scene um yeah I think that's enough thank you unless people have uh more questions maybe I just think yeah we slowly kind of getting to the half past seven uh anyway I I just thought maybe for the to close it to go back to the title uh that you chose for this uh talk and the infrastructures of the obvious so could you maybe just talk a little bit more about yeah yeah so I think it it actually this is okay this is really really cool question uh so I think it actually it goes back to what you what we just talked about the the the sort of empty streets and closed galleries it's um I think it's super interesting to actually observe uh the uh normal things in uh in a different circumstance so I think the title is trying to um it's it's a combination of words that I feel are strongly sort of present in my vocabulary so infrastructure is something that is hidden and it's holding yeah it's it's it's an inside structure so it's something that is inside underneath it basically creates the skeleton of um either physical structures or um um yeah in case of soft um uh infrastructures it's it's something that uh could be called narrative or uh purpose or um I don't know uh mode of um organization maybe organization yeah uh so that's something I'm super interested in and and it's something that is super present I'm I'm kind of always interested in things that are just here playing inside um um and um um I'm I'm curious about how they work I think it's a it's a maybe maybe it's naive comparison but it's a bit like when a kid is unscrewing a little toy car to see how it works so I think I'm trying to use this as a method um um continually obviously I'm using um a different um different tools to do that and the obvious is uh again like what what is the obvious it's uh it's uh what we look at and that's a street full of people or it's a gallery with things but um um now we have the um amazing opportunity to um experience these exactly these cases quite uh quite differently so they suddenly the obvious is not so obvious anymore I mean um uh what is it the obvious uh I mean a lot of things have changed quite a bit um and we're kind of hoping that they will back they will return back to normal but already now with this we know that things will be different we know that we will be probably zoom zooming quite um often in the future even if everything goes well um um so there are changes to um how uh how we uh live and how we function um and the obvious is new obvious yeah not so obvious anymore not so obvious anymore yes thank you thank you Kinect I I mean we could stay a long time but the webinar is a weird format which is what the uh uh actually Petter Knobotius just texted me especially looking from a car he says it's such a strange format so I think this is this is all we have time for and since there are no questions I just want to thank you again for being our guest thank you very much for I really appreciate the choice of projects and the variety and complexity but also these really strong links that I feel exist among them that that speak of your very particular languages and so thanks a lot and I hope to invite you I would super much like to thank you for inviting me it was really enjoyable um yeah I hope we'll get to see um next time in real life in person so bye take care okay thank you very much bye bye