David Možný: Lowdown
October 10 – November 3, 2019
opening: October 9, 2019 from 6PM
curator: Pavel Vančát
the exhibition takes place within the Fotograf Festival
To what extent are space, time and reality undoubtable, and how much are they just a custom that we have blindly accepted as a given of life? To what extent is reality fake and illusion true? Where is the borderline between disbelief and suggestion? The artistic work of David Možný can be summarized in these questions.
For two decades now, David Možný has been one of the most progressive Czech and Moravian artists working on the boundary of video, virtuality and installation. Since approximately the beginning of the millennium, he has been working with fragments, details and environments of design and architecture of the 20th century, out of which, using complicated animations, he creates impressive mutating shapes and spaces (the most complex one of them was the complete deconstruction of the Rumanian block housing development Rahov). In doing so, he produces completely new autonomic worlds with absurd physical plots, which are probably the most advanced forms of virtual reality on the Czech artistic scene, but at the same time they are also like a meditation about the nature and heritage of Eastern European version of modernism. Furthermore, in the last few years, Možný often creates entire real environments, which return the possibilities of virtuality back to a threedimensional physical space (e.g. his halucinogenetic installation of a turist camper, which we can currently see at the Festival 4+4 Days in Motion).
The English title Lowdown, which Možný chose for the exibition in the Gallery Jelení has a double meaning: it is either an adjective referring to being mean and unfair “dirty lowdown tricks”, or on the contrary it is a noun referring to true facts or relevant information about something. The word that turns inside out depending on the context is the emblem of the installation, which switches itself between two absolute states – one of darkness and one of blinding light that awakens the installation rooted in unlimited possibilities of virtual simulation. It is our world that we know so well, which falls apart here into freely levitating pieces that lose their original characteristics. It is the world of the present that is very real, as well as engineered - to the extent where the borderline between these two worlds starts to get erased in order for it to continue to be a constantly renewing field of interest for David Možný.
Pavel Vančát
(transl. Vanda Krutsky)
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7
Partners: Kostka stav
Media support: ArtMap, jlbjlt.net, UMA: You Make Art
