Database

OLOMOUC MUSEUM OF ART – CENTRAL EUROPEAN FORUM
SEFO CONFERENCE, 16. 9. 2023
NOT FOR SALE / SOLD OUT
A gathering on the recent history and trends in cultural diversity in Central Europe

This meeting draws on artistic and curatorial investigations into the art of the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe seen from the perspective of the then emerging artist-run initiatives and networks outside the cultural centers and institutions. The goal of this meeting is to address the histories and potentials of such (often half-forgotten) case studies, models, strategies, networks and experiences, as well as to discuss the place of art in post-socialist societies in the period of 1989–2000. The archive of Hermit Foundation and Center for Metamedia Plasy, which is in the collection of Olomouc Museum of Art, offers an example and is a step towards the outline of a broader geographical, socio-political and cultural map. It indicates how and by whom the organizers were inspired and what contacts and exchanges they established with similar centers and initiatives in the West and in the closer Central European area.
                                                
Similar to the earlier “underground” or gray-zone communities, such initiatives were often sustained by the artists themselves. Some of them were not professionally educated, seldom bound to academic or state structures and often existed on the periphery. Similar to the established network of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art in Central Europe, their activities often lingered in unestablished disciplines and trans-national networks. Such initiatives frequently didn't fit the predefined artistic categories and geopolitical communities (national narratives as the Czech, Polish, Hungarian art scene, classical disciplines such as the visual arts, music, or performance art). Their hybrid and temporary character may be the reason why only rarely did they attract the curiosity of art historical academic discourse and why they still await their evaluation.
The aesthetic, ideological and economic strategies of those initiatives covered a wide range, but what they shared was the notion of a close relationship between contemporary culture, civic values and freedom, both in the individual and social sense. To a certain extent, these and other initiatives followed the pre-revolutionary ‘anti-political’ tendencies, whose social strategy was ‘to democratize society rather than the state.’ Some of them rooted from unofficial communities of the 80s, and some succeeded in becoming a temporary alternative to the concept of art intended primarily for the art market, entertainment and consumption. 

PARTICIPANTS
Barbora Kundračíková (Olomouc), Jakub Frank (Olomouc), Miloš Vojtěchovský (Prague), Anna Olszewska (Kraków), Vít Havránek (Prague), Michal Murin (Bratislava), Gertrude Moser-Wagner (Vienna), Petr Bergmann (Broumov), Tomáš Ruller (Brno), Michael Delia (USA / Prague), Martin Zet (Libušín), Ivan Mečl (Kyjov), Alexander Roberto Moust (Amsterdam), Barbora Klímová (Brno)
Online participants: Dušan Barok (Oslo), Miklós Peternák (Budapest), Marina Gržinić (Vienna), Jovita Pristovšek (Ljubljana), David Miller (Canada)

ORGANIZATION
Concept: Jakub Frank, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Barbora Kundračíková
Moderation: Jakub Frank, Miloš Vojtěchovský
Production: Jakub Frank, Štěpánka Bieleszová
Technical production: Kamil Zajíček, Jan Hlavsa, Hynek Petrželka
Photodocumentation: Tereza Hrubá, Alexander Roberto Moust


ONLINE STREAM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWRZTvgljmrjQsdj_wfbNyCmmyRl7GITX



The gathering was proposed and organized by the curators of the Flashback: Hermit 1992–1999 exhibition, Jakub Frank and Miloš Vojtěchovský, and is supported by the Olomouc Museum of Art.

Speakers

PETR BERGMANN (Broumov, Praha)
Petr Bergmann has been socially and politically active since the 1980s in the areas of animal rights, nature protection, national minorities, shared economy, etc. He currently lives in the Broumov region, where he researches and revives the local cultural and historical memory of the past two centuries. He runs his own publishing house, publishes and organizes exhibitions at home and abroad. He is associated with the legendary punk zine Maximum Rocknroll, with the Black Hand cultural and social center (1991–1997, Prague), with the Animal S.O.S. movement (from 1992) and with the Ashoka Foundation (2002–2003). He is the author of the books Papírový apsolutno (1990), Scene in Danger(an unpublished study of the local alternative culture, 1998), Sněžný Iwan (a monograph of the painter Friedrich Iwana, 2020), Fates Written with a Chisel (monograph of the sculptor Emil Schwantner, 2022) and Adalbert Meier: Home/Heimat (monograph of photographer, 2022).

Contact: petr.bergmann@volny.cz
MICHAEL DELIA (USA, Praha)
Michael Delia is an artist/musician whose work spans a wide range of disciplines and media. His work has encompassed paintings, sculpture, installations, and sound art as well as music performances. Sound was introduced as an element into his sculptural installations and found object sculptures resulting in homemade musical instruments and objects. In 1992 he traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he participated in the first Hermit symposium in Plasy. There he began artistic and musical collaborations with Czech artists and musicians (Orloj snivců Jaroslav and Michal Kořán, Petr Nikl, Martin Alačam, etc.), which continue to this day. His Czech activities include participation in the interactive exhibitions “Orbis Pictus” and “Play” curated by Petr Nikl.

Contact: mdelia1963@gmail.com
www.mdelia-studio.com
 
VÍT HAVRÁNEK (Praha)
Vít Havránek is an art historian with an interest in the creation and history of artistic exchanges between the First, Second and Third Worlds after the Second World War. Havránek spent many years as the director of the tranzit.cz art centre, which is part of a network of organisations active in five countries in Central and Eastern Europe. This experience gave him a unique overview of critical and innovative topics that bring together schools, museums, and art institutions in the former Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other countries where he worked. He has curated many exhibitions of contemporary art, including U3 Triennial Ljubljana, Jakarta Biennale 2017, Manifesta 8. He has lectured at universities in the Czech Republic and as a guest lecturer at universities in the United States and Europe.

Contact: vit.havranek@avu.cz
BARBORA KLÍMOVÁ (Brno)
Barbora Klímová is a visual artist interested in the aspects of vernacular cultural history. She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, BUT, Brno and at HISK, Higher Institute for Fine Arts, Antwerp. In 2013, she defended her PhD thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. In 2006, she started to explore the contexts of culture and visual art in Czechoslovakia during the normalization period in the 1970s and 1980s. She has been the head of the Environment Studio, Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno, since 2011.

Contact: barbora.klimova@email.cz
IVAN MEČL (Kyjov)
Ivan Mečl is an artist, art critic, publisher and curator living and working in Kyjov near Krásná Lípa. He runs the publishing house and design studio Divus, founded in 1992 and dedicated to international, progressive, nonofficial or marginal(ised) contemporary culture. Divus publishes (since 1997) the review Umělec in Czech, English, German (occasionally also Spanish, Russian and Chinese) editions, artists' books, and also organizes exhibitions, performances, interventions, manifestations and other events. In 2014, Mečl and Divus moved to new premises in the former paper mill in Vrané nad Vltavou near Prague and later to Nová Perla premises in north Bohemia. Divus also had offices in London, Berlin and elsewhere. In 2013, Mečl received the Věra Jirousová Award for his contribution to art criticism.  

Contact: ivan@divus.cz
www.novaperla.cz
GERTRUDE MOSER-WAGNER (Wien)
Gertrude Moser Wagner lives and works as a freelance artist in Vienna. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She works with video, sculpture and conceptual text. Another focus of hers is interventions in public space and communication projects that she implements in close cooperation with artists and professionals from other disciplines. She taught at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, at the University of Applied Arts and at Webster University, Vienna. She participated in several events in Plasy and exhibited in Prague. Artist-book BALANCE North, West, South, East – published in 2023.

Contact: gertrude.moser-wagner@chello.at
www.moser-wagner.com
 
ALEXANDER ROBERTO MOUST (Amsterdam)
Alexander Roberto Moust is a filmmaker, writer, entrepreneur in the social domain, with broad experience in EU migration issues and solutions. He lived and worked in half a dozen countries and has contributed to many films, publications, exhibitions and is also a mentor for young film and photography students and migrants.

Contact: lxndr.nl@gmail.com
www.lxndr.nl
 
MICHAL MURIN (Bratislava)
Michal Murin is a Slovak intermedial artist, installation, object, theater artist and performer. As a curator, he deals with sound art, new media, conceptual art and radio art. He is a founding member of the Society for Unconventional Music (1990) and KRUH (1994), which is published by the magazine PROFILE of contemporary fine art. He is an international advisor to the Rosenberg Museum and the director of the Piano Hotel, the author of the @rtzoom project. He emerged from an alternative, experimental and unofficial artistic environment in Slovakia. In 1985, he wrote the Plays of the Plays manifesto. He co-founded the group Balvan (1987–1992), worked as a curator and organizer in Transmusic comp. (Milan Adamčiak and Peter Machajdik, 1989-96), Musicsolarium cycle (1993–1994), Sound Off festival (1995–2002), Lengow & HEyeRMEarS (with Jozef Cseres), SNEH and Warps, worked closely with Milan Adamčiak in the last years of his life.

Contact: michal.murin@gmail.com
 
ANNA OLSZEWSKA (Kraków)
Anna Olszewska is a researcher in the field of visual studies, image analysis, print history, history of science and curatorship, and she worked for the Print Room of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Science and Technology in Krakow. She is the initiator and curator of the Re:Senster project.

Contact: aolsz@agh.edu.pl
www.senster.agh.edu.pl
TOMÁŠ RULLER (Brno)
Tomáš Ruller is a Czech visual artist and performer devoted to creating in real space and time. His works include multimedia performances, installations, videos, architectural implementations and stage sets. He is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts (Brno University of Technology), which he helped to establish in 1992. He is a co-founder of the international movements of performers School of Attention (1983) and Black Market (1985), and he organized the festivals Open Situation/European Project. He is represented by Feldman Gallery New York, and his work has been shown at many galleries and festivals in the Czech Republic and abroad. 

Contact: tomas@ruller.cz
www.ruller.cz
MARTIN ZET (Libušín)
Martin Zet is a Czech visual and multimedia artist, primarily a performer and sculptor, though his work also includes drawings, photographs, video and artist's books. In 2013, he received the Umělec má cenu prize (Artist Has a Prize), which is awarded by young visual artists, critics and theorists to inspiring members of older generations. In his work, Zet combines personal and socially engaged themes, for example in his long-term artistic research into the sculptural legacy of his father Miloš Zet, where he pointed out the links to the period and personal context that determine their creation and ideological focus. His strongly conceptual work is based on engagement with temporality, materiality and memory, as well as humor and metaphorical hyperbole.

Contact: m.zet@volny.cz
www.martin-zet.com
 
DUŠAN BAROK (Oslo) – online
Dušan Barok’s work is concerned with digital culture, memory studies, and activism. He is founding editor of Monoskop.org, a research platform for the arts and humanities. He worked as a research fellow at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, University of Amsterdam, where he focused on the history and preservation of contemporary art as part of the New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA) program. In 2022, together with Ivana Rumanov, he organized the exhibition program We Have Never Been Closer at tranzit.sk in Bratislava, which was dedicated to the transformation period of the 1990s in Central Europe.

Contact: db@societyofalgorithm.org
www.monoskop.org/Dušan_Barok
MARINA GRŽINIĆ (Wien) – online
Marina Gržinić is a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, head of the Studio for Post-Conceptual Art Practices (PCAP, IBK). She is principal investigator of the art-based research project Conviviality as Potentiality (FWF AR679, 202125) and the Citizen Science project Citizens Memories and Imaginaries (FWF TCS 119, 202223). She was the principal investigator of the research project Genealogy of Amnesia (FWF AR439, 201821). She is a philosopher, theorist, and an artist with a career spanning forty years. She co-edited with J. Pristovšek and S. Uitz the volume Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). She is co-curator of the international group exhibition Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Counter-Archives for Future Memories (with S. Uitz and C. Jauernik, Weltmuseum Wien, 202021). Her recent publications include Re-Activating Critical Thinking in the Midst of Necropolitical Realities: For Radical Change (co-edited with J. Pristovšek; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022) and Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theories, Trans Bodies (co-edited with J. Pristovek; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023)

Contact: m.grzinic@akbild.ac.at, margrz@zrc-sazu.si
www.grzinic-smid.si
DAVID MILLER (Canada) – online
David Miller is a Canadian artist born in Montreal. In broad terms, his work explores the relationship between what is evident (appearance) and the unrecoverable (disappearance). His installations, site works, performances and photographs have been exhibited widely across Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and in the United States. David took part in several Plasy symposiums, was a visiting teacher at Brno Favu and taught at FAMU in Prague. Miller was the initiator behind the participation of Canadian artists at the Meridian Crossing symposium.

Contact: millerdmc@gmail.com
www.sites.google.com/site/millerdmc2/david-m-c-miller-works
MIKLÓS PETERNÁK (Budapest) – online
Miklós Peternák is a writer, lecturer and film/video artist. He was a member of the Béla-Balázs-Studio, Budapest (1981–1987) and the Indigo-Group and head of the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts since its foundation, and has been director of C³: Center for Culture and Communication (http://www.c3.hu/) since 1997. He produced films and videos in the 1980s and published texts on art and media history. He has also organized diverse shows and events.

Contact: peternak@c3.hu
www.pm.c3.hu
JOVITA PRISTOVŠEK (Ljubljana) – online
Jovita Pristovšek is a post-doctoral researcher in the art-based research project Conviviality as Potentiality (FWF AR679, 202125). She was a postdoctoral researcher in the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia (AR 439, 201921) and the Citizen Science research project Citizens Memories and Imaginaries (FWF TCS 119, 202223). Since 2023, she is a Research Assistant at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her recent publications include Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality (co-edited with M. GRŽINIČ and S. Uitz; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), Re-Activating Critical Thinking in the Midst of Necropolitical Realities: For Radical Change (co-edited with M. GRŽINIČ; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022), and Political Choreographies, Decolonial Theories, Trans Bodies (co-edited with M. GRŽINC; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023).

Contact: j.pristovsek@akbild.ac.at
www.zalozba-sophia.si/avtor/jovita-pristovsek
JAKUB FRANK (Olomouc) – moderator
Jakub Frank is a curator and art historian. He works as the curator of modern and contemporary art and the collection of new media and intermedia at the Olomouc Museum of Art and as the editor-in-chief of the Central European Art Database project. He previously worked as the PR and communications manager at the PLATO gallery in Ostrava. Since 2013, he has been the curator of Galerie Cella and Hovoren and a member of the association Bludný kámen in Opava. Since 2017, he has been the curator of the exhibition section of the Luhovaný Vincent festival and also a member of the Olomouc collective 8848. Since 2020 he is the co-curator of the Kukačka public art festival in Ostrava. He is focused on the mapping and promotion of independent audiovisual culture and organizing exhibitions and concerts in Opava, Ostrava and Olomouc. In 2016, he co-founded Kon:post, a platform for the presentation of contemporary art.

Contact: frank@muo.cz
www.bludnykamen.cz
 
MILOŠ VOJTĚCHOVSKÝ (Praha) – moderator
Miloš Vojtěchovský is an art historian, mediator, and artist. In 1992, he co-founded the Hermit Foundation, later the Center for Metamedia Plasy. From 1996 he was co-curator of the Dawn of the Magician exhibition project at the National Gallery in Prague. Together with Peter Cusack he initiated the project Favorite Sounds of Prague (2008 – sonicity.cz). His decades of curatorial and scholarly activity includes curating the Czech section in the international networking project Soundexchange.eu, co-curating the symposium and festivals by the Agosto Foundation vs. Interpretation, or Frontiers of Solitude (2016). Other, mainly community-oriented projects include: Orbis Fictus Revised (ZKM, 1992–1994), Radio Jelení, Radio Lemurie TAZ (2000–2008), Soundworms Ecology Gathering (2017), Architecture and Senses (2018), and recently the activities of the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE).

Contact: zvukac@centrum.cz
www.sonicity.cz
BARBORA KUNDRAČÍKOVÁ (Olomouc) – introduction

Barbora Kundračíková is currently the head of modern art collections in the Olomouc Museum of Art – Central European Forum (SEFO). Since 2021 she is an assistant professor at the Department of Art History at the Palacký University in Olomouc. She cooperates with the Photography Research Centre of the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, and works as a freelance curator. Her area of interest includes European visual arts of the 20th a 21st centuries, technical representations (Photography, Printmaking), the methodology of Art History, and analytic approaches to Aesthetics.

Contact: kundracikova@muo.cz

Gallery

Muzeum umění Olomouc 2011-2025