Loathing...

Technology as a silent witness to the permanent movement of celestial bodies... The light installation visualizes the arrival and departure of daylight as contemplation and a dramatic process. By condensing one day into a few minutes, it thematizes the passage of time and the cyclicity of natural processes.

Transforming the author’s film from the 1970s, the film trilogy captures a naked woman’s body in gentle motion iterations.  The combination of abstract expressionism and the figural motif uses distinctive colours, rapid shape-shifting and the dynamics of the human silhouette.

Why do we have hairs, what is their purpose, what are they made of, and when did we stop loving them? The hybrid audiovisual essay with performative moments gives us various perspectives of the hair. Instructional video elements based on facts and macroscopic details are interspersed with staged and highly stylized scenes.

Fascinations: Exprmntl.cz - Out of competitionThe common denominator of the videos is the theme of therapeutic or relaxation exercise, the goal of which is to release mental and physical tension. In each of these works, however, a critical sting can be observed, honed by the frustrations of man in today’s world – whether they’re related to politics, interpersonal relations, or pressures at work. The transfer of these videos from a gallery context into a cinema changes the viewers’ experiences: the viewer is confronted with the images more urgently, they feel the tension building and releasing, and hence empathy with those observed.The series of videos was developed in cooperation with the Jindřich Chalupecký Society. Curated by Tereza Jindrová (Jindřich Chalupecký Society) as part of her research while organizing the exhibition Healing, dedicated to the topic of health in contemporary art.Prezentovaná díla:Migra jóga / Migra YogaCzech Republic, 2012, 10 min.Director: Markéta MagidováPrvotní promluva / Primal SpeechUnited States, 2016, 12min.Director: Liz Magic LaserNěkdy se cítí skoro šťastně / Sometimes They Almost Feel HappyCzech Republic, 2015, 9 min.Director: Barbora KleinhamplováSpolečně 2017 / Together 2017United Kingdom, 2017, 10 min.Directors: Lucy Beech & Edward ThomassonDvě minuty / Two MinutesCzech Republic, 2016, 6 min.Director: Jakub Jansa

By combining animated real objects, abstract illustrations, and computer graphics, a collage emerges of seemingly incompatible elements through which the filmmakers show the four basic elements – earth, air, water, and fire – and one place – they search for inspiration and passion in structures, shapes, surfaces, and materials of Švihov Castle.

Civilization at the Crossroads: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Future of Socialism in Educational Films of the Sixties The screening is a precursor to the exhibition The Self-Awareness of Science: The Scientific-Technical Revolution and the Limits of Emancipation, which will open in December 2018 at Prague’s Display and FUTURA galleries. The exhibition will look at the activities in the 1960s of an interdisciplinary research team led by philosopher Radovan Richta that was expected to present a vision for “the new Czechoslovak model of socialism.” The advent of cybernetics and automatization was expected to help create a more humane socialist society in which people would be liberated from manual labor and from preexisting ideological authorities and predefined roles. The exhibition, which is being prepared by a team of historians, curators, and artists, tries to find the fine line between the liberating potential of science and technology and their use for maintaining and cementing technocratic power or authoritarian regimes. Its aim is to reconstruct the interdisciplinary dialogue of the 1960s, which has recently taken on new meaning, in particular in relation to the subjects of automatization, a society without work, or climate change.   The screening is part of the project “Shape the Future! The Concept of the Science-Technical Revolution,” organized as part of the program “Strategies AV21: Europe and the State: Between Barbarism and Civilization” (Czech Academy of Sciences, 2018)  

Through performances in the post-industrial landscape of the Most Basin, the filmmaker addresses the consequences of exploiting natural resources. Live tableaux, in which symbolic funerals for the devastated landscape - paradoxically full of strange unnatural beauty – are held, are a critical commentary on how we deal with the natural environment.

An interplay of horizontal and vertical lines, as well as other types of lines, found in in the public space, evokes a lyrical narrative combining them into a visual continuity in one image. Among found objects, events, and spaces, new relationships and continuations are created.

Dry ground, gravel, cracks in the asphalt, a look into a microscope, and a weather map as parts of an associative string based on the theme of waiting for the rain. The visual poem shows the soil in close-ups, adding new visual and semantic layers. 

The almost hallucinogenic whirlwind of virtual views of potential targets of a nuclear attack in a “buffer zone” shows the viewer an unpleasant proximity of total destruction, which threatened Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. The visuality of the film, reminiscent of direction finding, was created using the data from Google Maps.

Signum Supra presents art as a shamanic ritual, as an aestheticized tool materializing principles that cannot be grasped by consciousness. Gripping structures that resemble rocks and landscape contours float in indeterminate space, serving as a springboard for contemplating the patterns of perception beyond the visible and the tangible.

A film essay based on the conflict between decorative shots from a bird’s eye perspective and three mechanical, linearly-connected monologues dissects the subconsciousness of an individual saturated with a multitude of differing choices, opinions, and possibilities in the numbers-driven age of digital media.