At Our Place

Burgrave’s house at Klenová castle
10. 6. - 3. 9. 2023

Exhibiting artists: 

Jaroslav Beneš, Michaela Brachtlová, Jiří Hanke, Miloš Houdek, Gabriela Sauer Kolčavová, Vojtěch Kovářík, Naďa Kováříková, Josef Moucha, Michal Sedlák, Denisa Sedláková

Exhibition curator: Jolana Havelková

At Our Place presents a number of different viewpoints on the subject of our relationship to a place, be it our home, our native city or landscape, or any other place that we revisit throughout our lives. It also explores our notions of the existing and non-existing places to which we relate for various reasons. Some of the exhibiting artists work with family archives or with a longitudinal approach to documentary photography. The exhibition includes traditional photographs as well as examples of intermedia art and object art, but also linocuts made on the basis of photographs. With the exception of Jiří Hanke’s work, which is of a conceptual character, the exhibition does not include documentary photography.

Some of the artists have spent many years exploring the idea of place or personal space. For instance, the predominantly minimalist contact prints of Jaroslav Beneš (1946) focus mainly on recording the urban landscape (Untitled, ongoing since the 1980s), while Jiří Hanke (1944), in his series Views from the Window of My Flat (1981–2003), captures the changing street scenes outside the window of his home in Kladno. In so doing, he presents us with a report on situations and stories from the Normalization era and the post-communist years as well. By comparison, Josef Moucha (1956) approaches his series Driving Through My Hometown (1996) as a momentary subjective record of Hradec Králové – a city in which he was born but never spent much time.

Naďa Kováříková (1977) has a day-to-day connection with the landscape (bushes, trees, meadows), which she photographs on large-format negatives. Her hand-bound book (Untitled, 2015–2020) was made as a traditional photo album and feels like a journal. Vojtěch Kovářík (1973) similarly records various places and indoor areas around his home in Jindice and in nearby Kolín. He then transforms these images into linocuts (e.g., The Left Wall of the Kolín Ossuary, 2016, Road II, 2015, Poďousy II, 2023 ).

The photographer and poet Miloš Houdek (1944) notices patterns and images in randomly arranged grass and twigs on his winter walks along the Elbe River (Pilgrims in Time, 1998–2008). He then combines his photographs resembling calligraphy with poetry – specifically, the Japanese poetry form of haiku.

Michaela Brachtlová’s (1970) photographs of an abstract model of the city with geometric shapes, The City (2016), encourage the viewer to reflect on the possible structure and function of the inhabited city as an urban unit.

Denisa Sedláková (1972) takes an intermedia approach to the subject, finding inspiration in found family artifacts and in the search for her ancestors. Her work is based on family photographs taken in front of a farmstead in southern Bohemia. Her object (Landscape H, 2023) made of photographs, glass negatives, and other materials lets us look into an album full of memories and stories.

In a black-and-white photograph combined with silver-wire drawing, Michal Sedlák (1971) captures the image of a freely floating landscape on a lake near Čelákovice. His work responds to the local tradition of willow wickerwork, which in the past was used to reinforce the banks of rivers and ponds or to make baskets (Floating Island, 2023). Sedlák’s work combines reality with his own vision of place.

In her work, Gabriela Sauer Kolčavová (1977) has interpreted a visit to the tower of the Church of St. James the Greater in her native Boskovice (CYCLE, 2012–2016), as well as the personal experience of moving from there to the nearby village of Vratíkov, which has presented her with a new setting for her life, for discovering the space around her, and for observing the landscape (A New World, 2019 – 2023).

The initial impulse for the choice of artists was an attempt at presenting distinctive artistic personalities who are active primarily in the Elbe River region (Kolín, Čelákovice) and whose work I have been following for a long time. Over time, the exhibition grew to include artists who have explored this region in their work (Jaroslav Beneš), plus other artists as well.