Heroes' Prop Room
Soon in Palffy Palace
The exhibition Heroes' Prop Room presents the results of long-term artistic research focused on former and contemporary military spaces in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Through a complex, multimedia installation of a series of videos, objects, and images, Radovan Čerevka reflects on and relates transformations of the functions, uses, and perceptions of a particular cultural landscape.
In the sites examined, shaped by tension between original militaristic uses and contemporary adaptations for new purposes, the artist uncovers memory traces and explores the complex interactions between nature, visitors, and military technology.
The former military zones have not only formed unique habitats that reveal surprising effects of military activity on fauna and flora, they have also become hybrid places that stimulate the imagination. Their design and original and secondary uses have been shaped by diverse ideas and preconceptions about military conflicts and their simulation, about heroism, adventure, recreation, and human behaviour, understood both from an individual perspective and as part of the impersonal body of the military.
In the current era of escalating threats of global conflict, increasing defence spending, and an accompanying militarisation of society, thinking about the networks of relationships forming in spaces of former military activities takes on a highly topical dimension. The artist's creative dialogue with remnants of the past and their adaptation reveals natural and cultural aspects of the military that usually remain unrepresented.
