Review „Fotograf Festival HYPERTENSION23“
December 2023 – art magazine Flash Art (Czech & Slovak edition) print no. 70 “Clubbing”
ENG translation
I have limited the activities of this year's Fotograf Festival to the exhibitions at the Trade Fair Palace (National Gallery Prague) and Fotograf Gallery, which, alongside the project in the public space of Prague's Můstek metro station (Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist) and the pulsating techno-dance performance by choreographer Michel Rizzo, have left a distinct mark in my memory. Hypertension, the word from which the title of the thirteenth edition is based, is most often associated with a disease of civilization whose incidence increases in proportion to the degree of development of a given society, which is also due to the use and application of new technologies. Where and to what extent can the human body and mind be stretched before it crosses a certain threshold of no return? How is societal "overpressure" interpreted in the language of visual artworks?
Photography and video, by virtue of their visuality and their connection with technologies per se, take a fundamental role in depicting not only the current world and the world of the future, which is, among other things, the prevailing perspective of both exhibitions, but also the world of the recent past. The exhibition of the same name, subtitled Search Deep Inside Yourself, opens on the top floor of the National Gallery's premises under the curatorial supervision of Monika Čejková, with the American multimedia artist and pioneer of new media Lynn Hershman Leeson. Her works foreshadow the collective atmosphere that prevails over the entire floor and eventually the entire festival - unsettling, yet often critical and playful, suggesting a search for new identities among the supporting pillars of the technological singularity, constantly demanding our attention. The installation works by a total of ten artists (alongside Leeson, Sin Wai Kin, Stef Van Looveren, Cécile B. Evans, Ian Cheng, Stephanie Comilang, Martins Kohout, Lawrence Lek, aLifveForms - Protectorama, Markus Selg) are characterized by a non-linear structure, the use of hyperlinks, worldbuilding or speculative fiction, the questioning of binary oppositions and the analysis of human bodies, the critique of mobility and hypercapitalism, all in view of the extensive influence of media and cyberspace on the everyday experience of not only "new" virtual selves.
The exhibition New Flesh on Old Bones at Fotograf Gallery, curated by Tina Poliačková, introduced a collaborative project by Justine Grillet and Thijs Jaeger, unfortunately only lasting a month. In an interactive installation combining sound, moving image, hardware, mobile components and ceramics, the artist explored the contemporary understanding of the difference between reality and fiction in a post-digital society. The audience thus found themselves in an abandoned monstrous landscape that, in its gloom and network of cables, concealed a well from which a head with spinning eyeballs spoke to them. However bizarre, the scene, using a narrative of relics, traditional materials and craft with electronics in a darkened space and theatrical lighting, was undoubtedly a captivating scene. This was complemented by a cyberpunk video essay in the basement of the gallery themed around information warfare, which took a sophisticated detour back to Norse mythology and the god of war, Odin.
The thirteenth annual event undoubtedly touched on a wide range of important topics in today's accelerated culture and introduced the domestic audience to quality perspectives and sound names from the hypertension community beyond our national borders. However, if we aim to think truly globally in this context, it is already evident that there is a lack of representatives of both South American and African descent in the main exhibitions. The inclusion of these voices in the group of exhibitors would contribute to a more complex dialogue and to enrich the discussions that the festival has long sought to spark, which in this case have focused directly on questions relating to identities.
