Exhibition at Rudolfinum maps ‘mutations’ in contemporary Czech photography & art
“What exactly happened?” is the key question or starting point for a fascinating new exhibition which opened on Thursday at the Galerie Rudolfinum. Entitled Mutating Medium, the show focuses on changes in Czech photographic art over the last 20 years, as artists working in the medium shifted from traditional methods to new ways of seeing and treating the image, blurring at the edges with other forms, other media. The exhibition follows on the massive success of Decadence Now! with 150 dynamic and unusual works should prove just as stimulating.
“It’s definitely a big shift, from the very beginning of the show where you can see some quite classical let’s say post-modern or symbolist photographers, up to the very last portion of the show where you can see not even photographs but just shades and lights and the picture itself is breaking apart into pieces and is remodelled into something new. Over the last twenty years this medium has mutated into many different forms, many different formats, and many different multimedia solutions in the field of art. It’s important to stress that this is less an exhibition about photography than about contemporary art using photography and possible solutions on how to incorporate photography into contemporary art.”
“His works are among the most classical in the exhibition. On the other hand, many of the artists have pieces that reappear in different sections to provide a comparison, even if they don’t all fit in the same groups. I tried to bring a confrontational approach to all the rooms in the exhibition to get as much as possible in comparing different eras, genres, approaches.”
Similarly, the curator took a special approach to the interiors of the 19th century Neo-Renaissance building.
Much of the work on display is stimulating, whether the calm but somehow nerve-wracking silver bromide seas of Pavel Baňka, Markéta Othová’s Cesta (The Journey) which features an abstract black shape in an historic train yard but no train, or Veronika Bromová’s brutally anatomical digitally retouched photographs from her 1990s series Pohledy. There are ultrabright digitally altered landscapes by Štepánka Šimlová and an untitled lambda print of bright roses by Jiří Thýn, which forms the show’s central image. Lambda prints, produced by digital laser exposure of photographic film are extremely high resolution. I asked curator Pavel Vančát why this image in particular had been used to highlight the exhibition, and he talked about the artist’s broader work:
You chose the rose image as the central motif for the show?
“That was actually Petr Nedoma, the director of the Rudolfinum Gallery: we discussed three or four different pictures and each was worked on by a different graphic designer and we chose the best graphic design and that was it.”
“It is very much classical but I would say it is over-the-top classical. That’s tension ‘at the end of photography: today if you take a beautiful photograph of a beautiful rose you have to think ‘why’ anybody would take such a photograph. I think it’s getting a little bit scary to have such a beautiful photograph today.”
As for one of the main ideas viewers may take away? That photography in many ways melded with other media, subverted or was subverted by, absorbed, distilled by other forms only to resurface and metamorphosis again. Digital advances, now commonplace, provided new freedom for artists to explore. Pavel Vančát once more:
“Definitely it gave much more freedom and have an idiom for that, that today photography is no longer defined as a single branch of art but it is becoming something like a technique. Something described in the caption under the image. It’s difficult to say if the photographic tradition is continuing in some strict way and more that it’s continuing in broader aspects of contemporary art.”
