Icons and mythology

TOUHA AFTER THE CHANGE

Artists Zbyněk Baladrán, Kapwani Kiwanga, Violaine Lochu, Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík, Zorka Ságlová, Martin Zet. Revolution is a political act of protest and reform, to which the exhibition approaches meta-thought through a mythological and iconic dimension. These are structural forms of a more subversive and personal nature, but this does not detract from their passion for ideological and identity struggles . On the one hand, it is a question of the appropriation of reality, in which the boundaries between narrative and fabulation, the real and the figurative, are blurred, and a space is created for the formation of meaning - mythology. On the other hand, it is a question of belief, where a person and/or an object embody a public dissent, resistance or struggle - an icon. For some, the projects collected in this exhibition rebuild this mythological construct built for the purpose of protest and coercion. The emergence of a man who, through his actions and his personality, becomes an image - an icon - of dissent, of struggle. At the same time, they are interested in action, in representation in its collective dimension. In this multimedia installation, Martin Zet is interested in the figure of the activist and Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, who led the Belgian Congo to independence and was subsequently assassinated. In the course of his research, Martin Zet noticed that the information available on the life of this emblematic figure varies depending on the language in which one searches for it. This question of the transmission of history and its mutability also permeates the project Flyers and sympathy (2019) by Lucie Rosenfeldová and Matěj Pavlík, which analyses the possibilities of improving the democratisation of the media. Where are reality and truth to be found in the images we are presented with? In a projection of video, images and sounds conceived as a poem, it brings a new perspective on the events of the Velvet Revolution through the analysis of footage produced by students in the Most area as counter-information to inform miners about a political event that was not covered by the regime's official media. Zorka Ságlová, in turn, seized upon a legend, a folk myth, in an engaged artistic act of feminist claiming during a 1970 performance. In the framework of Laying of diapers at Sudoměř on the field near Sudoměra, where the famous Hussite battle took place in 1420, she spread out about 700 plumes in a triangle. This was a reference to the story in the region that Hussite women spread pieces of cloth on the muddy ground so that the knights of the Catholic Roman cavalry could entangle themselves in them with their spurs and thus become easy targets for the Hussite warriors. To this idea of faith and unifying history, Violaine Lochu has prepared a sound installation Unchorus (2019) working with notions of chorus and revolution. At a moment when the European project seems to be weakened (Brexit, the rise of nationalist parties...) and diverse protest movements emerge but fail to achieve any fundamental changes, this sound installation attempts to describe this complex period dominated by doubts, anxieties and the difficult search for a common voice. It is in order to overcome the idea of commonality and also racial segregation that the musician Sun Ra has created a character that transcends reality and finds anchorage in a parallel history, creating a myth, a legend. Video The Sun Ras Repatriation Project (2009) by Kapwani Kiwanga is an artistic gesture aimed at returning Sun Ra to his place of origin - Saturn. The jazz musician Sun Ra, who died in 1993, claimed to be from Saturn and promoted an "astro-black" philosophy that affirmed his extraterrestrial origins. Video of Zbyněk Baladrán One step forward, two steps back (2019) is a mental experiment in which the dilemmas to which humans are constantly exposed are addressed. How to act politically correct? How not to betray one's ideals at different levels and in different contexts? How not to betray oneself? Through Angela Davis and her tour of socialist countries, and Jiří Pelikán and his open letter calling for support for the imprisoned political prisoners in Czechoslovakia, this Leninist-named video delves into the collective memory. This is represented by a 3D model of the IKEA department store. As an impeccable business model, but also as a metaphor for the process of remembering, it shows us that the dilemmas are the same and are constantly recurring. Only the environment changes over time, creating new types of traps that are easy to fall into.