The exhibitions will touch on the sustainability of cultural identity, and the experience of fatherhood. Photo credit: Brno House of Arts.
Brno, Nov 23 (BD) – The Brno House of Arts is planning to open several new exhibitions before the end of the year.
The first is “The Next Stop” by Milena Dopitová, which will be on view in the main halls from 30 November 2022 to 19 March 2023. The exhibition reflects on the sustainability of a strong cultural, national, and ethnic identity, an issue which today weighs heavily on Western civilisation. The opening ceremony will take place on Tuesday 29 November at 6pm, in the presence of the artist, curator Martina Pachmanová, and other special guests. Markéta Vaňková, the Mayor of Brno, who has taken over the patronage of the exhibition, will also greet the audience at the opening. After the official opening, the music group Indican will perform.
Dopitová is the head of the Intermedia Studio I at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, where she also studied. In her work, she deals with social issues as well as questions of physical and gender identity, which she approaches from the perspective of an individual experience of everyday life. Her project paraphrases and mixes the language of Christian, Judaic, and Arabic traditions – the cultures that have most significantly shaped the European “West” for centuries, while at the same time using elements that evoke the ordinariness, and to some extent the superficiality, of life in contemporary society.
Alongside Dopitová’s showing will be a joint exhibition by painter Pavel Preisner and architect Svatopluk Sládeček in the Jaroslav Kral Gallery, entitled “On Fathers Who Help Their Children Grow Up”, which will be on view for the same period 30 November 2022 to 19 March 2023.
Pavel Preisner (born 1970) is from Zlin, where he currently lives and works. He has been an art teacher at the Zlin Higher Vocational School of Art since 1999; Svatopluk Sládček (born 1969) is originally from Zlin but now lives and works in Brno, where he has been teaching at the Brno University of Technology’s Faculty of Fine Arts since 2017.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, its central theme is the experience of fatherhood. The spatial dominant is an object, according to Sládeček, for whom the world of the child takes on the same significance as an architectural composition. Specifically, the exhibition will feature his small sculptural architecture with internal lighting and a dynamic element in the form of a car track. This structure will be surrounded by paintings by Preisner, whose subject is the parts of a child’s building set. The exhibition reflects the process of self-definition that both artists went through in different ways, and the gradual interaction of this newly established category with their profession.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue, a podcast, and a short video documentary capturing the development process of the exhibition and the exhibition itself. In addition to the traditional guided tours, the accompanying program will also include an interdisciplinary debate on the relationship between art and social imagination. For more information, visit the exhibition website.
