Connections Unbroken

Exhibition in Palffy's palace

The body appropriately draws our attention as a two-way interface between the psychological and social aspects of our being. Its ambivalence, so attractive for the sphere of visual art, lies primarily in its functioning as a screen that either separates people from each other and emphasises their individuality, or, on the contrary, connects them; it thereby co-constitutes the intimate and social spheres of our immediate existence.
The Milota Havránková Foundation's exhibition attempts, again transgenerationally and intermediately (not solely photographically), to explore the intersections of these seemingly disconnected intellectual and creative frameworks and agents: the vague and the normative terrain of nature, city, society, and corporeality. The concept of the exhibition is based on the premise that the most intrinsic essence of corporeal (and urban) architecture is body-initiated relations to another body, to other bodies, communities, societies. The common ground between the authors, anchored beyond the normative world of the body, lends the exhibition concept a shared experience of existing within a part of society that is not mainstream, yet which is so crucial for the hope of a better world.

IVAN PINKAVA (1961)
One of the key themes accompanying the work of the exceptional Czech photographer Ivan Pinkava since the 1980s has been the subject of the body, oscillating between its physical essence and the symbolic anthropological, social, and cultural connotations attached to it. Corporeality (both human and non-human/object) is a fundamental building block of his work. It often actualises as a place where a system collapses, as a place of heterotopia, symbolic, subversive, disrupted, denaturalised. In many of Ivan Pinkava's photographs there is a peculiar archetypal parable based on well-known myths that has endured so much cultural ferment, misunderstanding, misuse, and emptying that it returns to us in the form of an ever more beautiful, but inherently subversive image.

JAN DURINA (1988)
Young Slovak intermedia artist who creates a peculiar universe of beings, identities, and narratives that come from this world as perhaps only its distorted mirror echoes. In his artistic thinking, he draws on critical queer concepts, feminist and ecofeminist theories, and autotheories. Issues of mental health, human vulnerability and care for others, cooperation, and themes of horizontally functioning interpersonal relationships emerge as a common, crucial, and all-pervading root of his works.

JOSEF MACH (1994)
Student at the Body Design Studio at the FaVU VUT in Brno engages within his artistic work mainly in installation, which occasionally transitions to the performative level. He is primarily interested in emotions that arise from collective human experience and that touch on more general social phenomena. The principles of paradox and absurdity are close to him. He seeks to reveal the energy that connects matter, emotion, and the body into a single endless stream of interconnected, though often contradictory, relationships.