DR.ART

The exhibition series for 2025 in the Olga Space gallery 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 contextualization, 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. Integral to the pilgrimage in unexplored terrain are the "lessons of 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 insists on internal connections.
Artistic research is in many ways a paradigm shift for artists. Art is no longer an arbitrary or solitary subjectively guided expression of the individual, but a planned communicated and, above all, complex activity that presupposes a lively interest in the contemporary world and arises 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.
Art is 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 at the same time quite seriously, based on the scientific title with all its associations: seriousness and merit, intellectual proficiency, academic insiderism, and the risk of stiffness 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.

PROGRAMME

14 November - 31 December 2025: MARTIN ZETOVÁ, VOJTĚCH MÄRZ ● MAN OF WORK

19 September - 6 November 2025: JAN TURNER ● THE ART OF NARCISSISM

26 June - 7 September 2025: PATRIK PELIKÁN ● INDEPENDENT

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

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