Sans titre

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I went to the national gallery to see Ai Wei Wei’s exhibition because I had to do a presentation in my contemporary art class about him. I learned quite a few things about him, and about his main piece titled ‘THE LAW OF THE JOURNEY’’. Ai Wei Wei made this exhibition as a statement on the human condition regarding refugees. I had so many ideas about this piece when I tried to analyze it, but this is the most important point that I thought of: the boat is made and the figures are made of rubber in reference to the boats used by refugees. The color used is black as in the Chinese culture black is often related to power or immortality, the artist may have wanted to prove a point that those refugees are here no matter what. Some figures are on the ground in reference to the millions  of death due to the trips they have to do in order to get to safety… Ai Wei Wei has become one of my favorite artistes after I saw what he has done for this project; he worked over two years helping in refugee camps and has documented their journey with multiple interviews and powerful statement. When you see someone working this hard for something, you know that they are really looking to prove a point with their art and that’s what I liked the most.

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What I like about ART is that you can create your own story based on every piece and sometimes if you have an exhibition where you just enter a space and you find a piece of art composed of multiple pieces that you can gather sometimes and create a bigger story and sometimes you just can’t get it. This time I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t as we went to visit meet factory and the gallery curator Zuzana Jakalova. We saw a project that she was working on and it was composed of multiple pieces such as paintings, a running shoe, material for cleaning, marble, vacuum tube … I was looking at it and trying my hard to understand it on my own but I couldn’t, even though I tried to look at it as one piece but still couldn’t and this is something that can happen sometimes if you don’t have background information on the project. I went to look after into the profile of the artist and it said that in her curatorial work she deals with topics of failure, unsuccess and embarrassment so here is  an info that might be helpful if you see one of her exhibition you might succeed in analysing it.

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We went to visit Hunt&Kastner gallery with my class and there was an exhibition of Bassim Magdy titled “Only stones, bronze and the sky shall outlive all the rest” I saw these pictures on the wall and I knew right away what I would write about. I saw each picture first by it s own and it felt like each one had it’s own story, most were buildings, factories, construction equipment, an elephant, miniature boat… there were 30 pictures and it felt like the artist had chosen fictional places, settings and scenarios, which let the people with a feeling skepticism and being lost, the way the images were displayed and the colors that were chosen shows that the artist looked to trigger a feeling of utopia and good sensations. The way that the image were displayed also helped Each image be a fragment of reality, and therefore subjected to critiques and different analysis but focalised on collective identity.

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We went with my class to visit Nevan Contempo gallery, and as entered the space there were different objects that I didn’t understand at first, sure I knew what it was but not what each object meant, so of course I had to understand it a way or another even if it was not the proper interpretation. As usual back home I saw the picture and sat to think about each piece, I started with the bed because it’s the firs thing I noticed, I said to myself that this artist is either so in love with his art that he wanted to sleep next to it or that he wanted to show the visitors that we human give so much importance to sleep and rest that we could considerate as art. The penis on the table was the second thing, I though it was to push people to talk about sexuality not as a taboo but as a normal subject that could be discussed anywhere. Then I turned toward the sugar that was thrown on the ground, first thing that I thought about, is sugar conception and how the society just went from eating healthy to eating what ever was offered by food companies. Notice that there is campfire next to it to point that this road was dangerous; the last thing I saw was coal and the first thing I thought of was industrialisation and where this got us today; meanwhile there was a kind of evangelical figure watching all of us.

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We visited Entrance gallery with my class, and we had the pleasure to see Markéta Magidová exhibition called Turbid Photosynthesis. I was intrigued by her pieces and how they were connected to both nature and imagination. The think that I didn’t like is that it showed how the world was cruel to mother nature and how there was a certain imbalance between what nature gave us and what we gave her in return. There was a certain piece that I liked, it showed a plant hanged out of the soil and I thought about how people are killing the world we live in, starting with their environment and going to social relation ships. Everything was blurry, you had to keep watching and try to fit the missing pieces of the puzzle. It was like in the real life in a way that we could only look and do nothing. The pieces all together could create multiple stories, and each one of us had their own perception, which meant each one of us had their own story.

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We went to visit Futura gallery that made it s opening few days ago, and as we were going through the old edifice I noticed a piece of painting that I liked. The first thing to I noticed is that the artist had an unbelievable technique as I felt like I was watching a cartoon figure. I think that the artist tried to illustrate the continuous and endless fight that we as humans have with the outside worlds, as it shows in the painting there is two tentacles belonging to some kind of monster coming from the dark part behind the door and that’s I think is meant to be the society and the problems that exists and how people try to hide from it by closing the door on the outside. I think that the artist also tried to show that humans have ongoing fights with themselves also whether or not they hide from the outside world, by having all the internal organs and the face appear outside of the body; nothing is in its place, it’s like the artist tried to show that the human is out spaced by his own problems.

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Yesterday we went to visit the DOX center of contemporary with my contemporary art class, we took the tram and as the location was a little bit far, few of classmates and I were waving goodbye to the center of Prague. Once we got there I forgot that it was far as I entered from the door and directly noticed that this was not a simple gallery, later I figured out why it was called a center. Inside we got introduce to the concept behind the DOX, we learned a little bit of its history, and unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to talk more about the subject. As we were heading to the exit we went through GULLIVER (a 42m long and 10m wide structure in the shapes of the twentieth century airship) And then we got to see HAVEL exhibition by Tomki Němec and Bohdan Holomíček, who for a number of years were by his sides and recorded multiple events that took place in his life, including the velvet revolution. I loved the two different techniques used to displays the photography, and also the fact that we got to see it from two different views. Although both photographers were by his side, one was his personal photographer and the other was a family photographer.

As I’m passionate about photography, I had an amazing time putting together the life of the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, and here is a taste of what I got to see.