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Inner thoughts, outer cheese

Futura makes a muddled point with a grab-bag of video art
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
April 18th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry's "Waiting Room."
Combining two group exhibitions that bring together more than 20 young artists dedicated to contemporary video projects, Futura is hosting a bona fide video orgy, though with mixed results. “Model of Constructivist Tower” by Zbyněk Baladrán.
“Punctum,” the main exhibition, takes pains to hold itself together despite an earnest explanation by curator Václav Magid that the show was inspired by Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, in which the French literary critic wrote about photography: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”
Magid admits that the works in this exhibition are not connected in any special way, other than having a peculiar detail, even if unintentional, or a flaw that pricked him. The viewer is left on his or her own to make sense of it all — or not.
At the beginning of the show, Coming Soon — a Homage to Édouard Manet presents a staged orgy involving two young women, two fat older men and ample amounts of Camembert cheese and chocolate mousse spread on erogenous zones, with an amusing running commentary by the actors. The culprits, Ondřej Brody with Kristofer Paetau, are paying tribute to Manet’s 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. But their modern variation is little more than clever porn, ostensibly for art’s sake. With such sexcapades as Coming Soon, the young and reckless Brody has recently surpassed David Černý for notoriety on the Czech art scene.
The show has no other attention-grabbers like Brody’s, but several other pieces are worthy of note.
Ján Mančuška and Jonas Dahlberg’s First Minutes of the Rest of the Movie is a woman’s monologue about falling asleep for a few minutes while watching a movie in a cinema, then waking up. To hear this monologue, the viewer must stand or sit in darkness looking at a large, dimly lit blank screen, with long gaps of silence. It makes for a perplexing experience.
Radim Labuda’s captivating video of two slackers in a messy room begins with one playing an accordion and the other eating a bowl of cereal. Then there is a nice slow-motion blur and reverb phase, like a David Lynch scene that goes nowhere, finally going silent and then back to sound. By the end, the accordionist is having a techno freak-out.
Michal Pěchouček’s Passenger Train is a highly stylized and impressively edited and presented piece, the best of the lot in “Punctum.” It projects three layers of scenes on a Czech train ride, with a strange romance involving a young conductor and a soundly sleeping girl. The scenes are constantly changing layers and sizes while separated by a large black space, creating a sense of cinematic wonder.
Almost merging with “Punctum,” the smaller show “You” features a video project by Czech artist Jiří Černický and a collective effort by English artists Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry, in cooperation with the VIVID Centre of Video Production in Birmingham. Černický’s series of “ABS Videos” is the most thought-provoking, probably because these works are mostly about our thoughts, not his.
In ABS–Train Station, Černický projects black-and-white images of  anonymous people on the Prague metro system with their thoughts shown as English-language texts running across the screen in increasing density, until the words finally obscure or bury the people. Černický notes that all of the quotes are authentic, gathered by a team of assistants who stopped the people who had just been captured on video, and asked them to articulate what they were thinking about as they were passing through the metro.
This is a brilliant concept, since most of us let our minds wander while traveling Prague’s public transportation system, wondering what all those other people are thinking about and what lies behind their grim stares and uncanny silence.
In ABS–Tower Block the project is even more complex, because the artist needed to install a bugging device at the entrance to a block of flats that would enable him to record anonymous voices and conversations. Again, this results in a stream of quotes (this time in Czech) by neighbors running across a large projection of rows of drab tower-block flats with their uniform balconies.
Thanks to Černický’s contribution to the exhibit “You,” you will now know what everyone around you is thinking about — and in most cases, thankfully, it isn’t you.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (18/04/2007):

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