DR.ART

The exhibition cycle for 2025 in the Olga gallery space continues the themes of the previous years (2024 - THE HERITAGE OF COLLECTIVES: ADAPTATION AND TRANSFORMATION, 2023 - PARENT, 2022 - DAUGHTERS SONS MOTHERS FATHERS), with an interest in the conditions in which art is created, and by defining art as a possible tool for overcoming deep social crises.

The "Dr.art" series focuses on the phenomenon of doctoral art studies, which has established itself in our cultural space relatively recently, but is undergoing even more dynamic development and has become an integral part of art education and operation. It is based on the methods of so-called artistic research, the definitions of which are a frequent topic of informal debate and the subject of a separate discipline. Until recently, arts research methodology made unusual demands on the arts: information, accurate contextualisation, collaboration with experts outside one's own field, planning and communication. It presupposes the ability to share process and results, to argue, to test, to reach out to lay people and experts. Doctoral projects tend to be deeper and longer dives into issues, with researchers and researchers often proceeding by a method of cross-cutting between disciplines, sometimes at an unexpected poetically defined point or where they only suspect a relationship that is as yet underestimated or undefined. An integral part of the pilgrimage in unexplored terrain tends to be "lessons in humility" - setbacks or so-called research uncertainties: diversions, dead ends, exhaustion of the original interest, disproved hypotheses, blocks, the discovery of America. Moreover, artistic practice itself usually resists, cannot be grafted onto the research conclusively, and the researcher easily feels like a fraud when he or she insists on internal connections. In many ways, artistic research is a paradigm shift for artists. Art is no longer an arbitrary or solitary subjectively driven expression of the individual, but a planned communicated and, more importantly, complex activity that presupposes a lively interest in the contemporary world and is produced in synergy with external factors. It has the ambition to "produce knowledge" that others, outsiders and insiders alike, can relate to, continue to use, or build upon. The arts are the fourth dimension of knowledge, alongside the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Debates about the future viability of our society should go beyond a narrow focus on scientific, economic and political structures. The exhibition series "Dr.Art" is exaggeratedly, but also quite seriously, based on the scientific title with all its associations: seriousness and merit, intellectual proficiency, academic insiderism, and the risk of rigidity and pomposity of the establishment, but above all the ability to heal. It suggests a belief in the transformative potential of art and is a recognition of its non-authoritarian authority. In this conception, art becomes an alternative model, which through its imagination can harmonize or detect a problem, put things in unexpected contexts, stop degenerative changes and start recovery. The very notion of "art heals" is based on the premise that various forms of artistic activity (active or passive) can have therapeutic and healing effects on the human body and mind. This will also be the content of the accompanying programmes that will develop the theme of the exhibition series.

EXHIBITIONS:

14 March - 7 May 2025: BARBORA DAYEF ● PROOF BY CIRCLE

16 May - 16 June 2025: FAME SOBOTOVIČOVÁ ● TURN AND LET ACT

26 June - 7 September 2025: PATRIK PELIKÁN ● INDEPENDENT