The Circular Ruins / Les Ruines Circulaires
With the artists :
Lara
Almarcegui (ES), Daniela Baráčková (CZ), The Bells Angels : Simon Bernheim
& Julien Sirjacq (FR), Louidgi Beltrame (FR), Émilie Benoist (FR), Nathalie
Brevet_Hughes Rochette (FR), Wojtek Doroszuk (PL), Barbora Klimová (CZ), Djamel
Kokene (FR), Svätopluk Mikyta (SK), Jarmila Mitríková & Dávid Demjanovič
(SK), Michal Moravčik (SK), Nicolas Moulin (FR), Florian Neufeldt (DE), Marketa
Othova (CZ), Jan Pfeiffer (CZ), Jiří Polaček (CZ), Florian Pugnaire & David
Raffini (FR), Nikolai von Rosen (DE), Christophe Sarlin (FR), Pavla Sceranková
(SK), Dušan Šimánek (CZ), Valentin Souquet (FR), Eric Stephany (FR), Fritz
Stolberg (DE), Ivan Svoboda (CZ), Adam Vačkař (CZ), Jaro Varga (SK), Sergio
Verastegui (PE).
Curated by Jean-Marc Avrilla
With the support of Institut Français, Goethe Institut and
Laboratoire Flair-Paris
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April 3rd – May 24th at Institut Français de Prague
April 3rd – May 18th at Meetfactory
The Circular Ruins
A dream woke up in the
dreamer’s dream…
J.-L. Borges, The
Circular Ruins
The representation of ruins have a long history in Western
art. Their new appearance last ten years shows not
so much importance that the same
plasticity of this topic whose causes have never stopped changing. Panegyrics of the greatness of ancient
civilizations during the Renaissance, critics of Enlightenment rationalism in
the eighteenth century, iconic images of romanticism, or painful frontal of
political upheaval of the 20th century, the ruins are an iconography of great
complexity where belong tensions of world and humans face their destiny.
The exhibition
The Circular Ruins,
borrowing its title from Jorge Luis Borges, paints a contrasting picture where
the psychic darkness of certain works meets a bright abstraction of others,
reflecting the role of ruins in the representation of a constantly changing and
violence of the contemporary. The memory of the ruins is a ghostly presence
that opens a new query of modernity through all our society. And constant is
going through time and history of their representation in articulating within
them a combination of images as nested, where a dialectic between diachrony and
synchrony seats.
The project consists of two independent and yet
communicating units. In the Institut Français, a choice of photographs and
videos by Czech and Slovak artists will be presented, from the 1980s to the
present. These works make use of the phenomena of appearances, their changes in
time and their transience. It’s not about melancholy, but rather the poetry of
simple and immediate things, that paradoxically illustrate the depths of
history.
The other part of the exhibition is taking place at the
MeetFactory Gallery and will introduce works of European or Europe-based
artists. The selected works or site-specific installations analyze within a
kind of journey the subject of ruins and how pictures are operating. The
exhibition intends to provoke thinking about the ways of depiction, the
complexity of contemporary views of references to the past and oblivion, and
about the different possible approaches to European history. Beyond, the
exhibition suggests the necessity of reconsidering the multiple modernity of
the world, as a return imposed by the artistic, historiographical,
anthropological thought, from non-Western modernities that have transformed the
approach of our memory and the world in last twenty-five years .
The ruins of the eighteenth century were part of a universal process of
thinking centered on Europe and its history. Representations of contemporary
ruins are built within a global thinking which forces us to question the
singular to think in difference.
