The Felix Jenewein Gallery of Kutná Hora

Authority: The Central Bohemian Region
Director: Mgr. Aleš Rezler

History:
From 1993, the gallery obtained official status as the City Gallery of Kutná Hora. Since 1995, besides taking care of the collection of the works of Felix Jenewein, the gallery has been engaged in exhibition production and building a new collection of contemporary art.

Collection:
The fond of Jenewein Collection combines the heritage of the gallery with contemporary practices and collecting works which are presenting this elaborated relationship.

Statement:

In order to alter script of the existing institutional practices for the City Gallery in Kutná Hora, we need more, rather then less reflection on the conception of publics, and the contingencies and histories of various modes of address. As I will try to argue, all exhibition making is the making of a public, the imagination of a world. It is therefore not a question of art for art’s sake or art for society, of poetics or politics, but rather a matter of understanding the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetic dimension of politics. Or put it another way, it is the mode of address that produces the public, and if one tries to imagine different publics, different notions of stranger relationality, one must also (re)consider the mode of address, or, if you will, the formats of exhibition making.
There not only exist public spheres (and ideals thereof), but also counterpublics. According to literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner, counterpublics can be understood as particular parallel formation of a minor or even subordinate character where other or oppositional discourses and practices can be formulated and circulated. Counterpublics have many of the same characteristics as normative or dominant publics – existing as imaginary address, a specific discourse and/or location, and involving circularity and reflexivity – and are therefore always already as much relational as they are oppositional. A counterpublics is a conscious mirroring of the modalities and institutions of the normative public, all be it in an effort to address other subjects and indeed other imaginaries. Where the classic bourgeois notion of the public sphere claimed universality and rationality, counterpublics often claim the opposite, and in concrete terms this often entails a reversal of existing spaces into other identities and practices, a queering of space. This has indeed been the model of contemporary feminist (and other) project exhibitions that use the art institution as a space for a different notion of spectatorship and collective articulation that runs counter to the art space’s historical self-articulations and legitimations, what Marion von Osten has
described as “exhibition making as a counter-public strategy”.
An exhibition must imagine a public in order to produce it, and to produce a world around it – a horizon. So, if we are satisfied with the world we have now, we should continue to make exhibitions as always, and repeat the formats and circulations. If, on the other hand, we are not happy with the world we are in, both in terms of the art world and in a broader geopolitical sense, we will have to produce other exhibitions: other subjectivities and other imaginaries. The great division of our times is not between various fundamentalisms, since they all ascribe to the same script (albeit with a different idea of who shall win in the end…), but between those who accept and thus actively maintain the dominant imaginary of society, subjectivity and possibility and those who reject and instead partake in other imaginaries, as Cornelius astoriadis once formulated it. For Castoriadis, society is an imaginary ensemble of institutions, practices, beliefs and truths, that we all subscribe to and thus constantly (re)produce. Society and its institutions are as much fictional as functional. Institutions are part of symbolic networks, and as such they are not fixed or stable, but constantly articulated through projection and praxis. But by focusing on its imaginary character, he obviously also suggests that other social organizations and interactions can be imagined:
[The] supersession [of present society] – which we are aiming at because we will it and because we know that others will it as well, not because such are the laws of history, the interests of the proletariat or the destiny of being – the bringing about of a history in which society not only knows itself, but makes itself as explicitly self-instituting, implies a radical destruction of the known institution of society, in its most unsuspected nooks and crannies, which can exist only as positing / creating not only new institutions, but a new mode of instituting and a new relation of society and of individuals to the institution.
It is thus not only a question of changing institutions, but of changing how we institute; how subjectivity and imagination can be instituted in a different way. This can be done by altering the existing formats and narratives, as in the queering of space and the (re)writing of histories – that is, through deconstructive as well as reconstructive projects, and by constructing new formats, by rethinking the structure and event of the exhibition altogether. Either way, I would suggest that curating in the future should center around three key notions: Articulation, Imagination, and Continuity.
By articulation we shall mean the positioning of the project, of its narratives and artworks, and its reflection of its dual public and placement both in and out of the art world. An exhibition is always a statement about the state of the world, not just the state of the arts, and as such it is always already engaged in particular imaginaries, whether or not it claims to be so engaged. A work of art is, at best, an articulation of something as much as it is a representation of someone; it is a proposal for how things could be seen, an offering, but not a handout. Articulation is the formulation of you position and politics, where you are and where you want to go, as well as a concept of companionship: you can come along, or not. In cultural production, there is no separation possible between form and content, between means and ends: modes of address articulate and situate subject positions, and where you want to go and how you get there are one and the same question. Thus, the more clearly the articulatory element is stressed, the more productive it will be in partaking in other imaginaries and subject positioning.
By imagination, we shall take our cue from the thinking of Castoriadis, and his analysis of society as self-created, as existing through institutions. It is, as stated, a question of imagining another world, and thus instituting other ways of being instituted and imagining, so to speak. To say that other worlds are indeed possible. For our present situation, we can also say: another art world is possible (if we want it). Secondly, the imaginary, as articulation, naturally has to do with the processes and potentialities of artistic production itself: to offer other imaginaries, ways of seing and thus changing the world. An artwork can indeed be seen as new modes of instituting, of producing and projecting other worlds and the possibility for the self-transformation of the world: An institutionalization that is produced through subjectivity rather than producing subjectivity. It can, quite bluntly, offer a place from which to see (and to see differently, other imaginaries).
By continuity, we shall refer to the very work processes of curating itself, and how it can appear as lost in repetitions and trends. Rather than feeding the market, repetition could be transformed into continuity, literally doing the same in order to produce something different, not in the products, but in the imagination. I propose not only working in the same field or theme as a researcher, but actually radicalizing this aspect, as well as the resistance to the market, by working on a long-term plan. Not a five-year plan, but rather a ten-year plan; constantly doing the very same exhibition with the same artists. Imagine this: constantly asking the same artists to contribute to the same thematic exhibition, thus going into the depths of the matter rather than surfing the surface. Indeed, going off the deep end as it were, by refusing the demands for newness, for constantly new (re)territorializations – “painting now!”. “the return of the political”, “new Czech art show”, etc. – and insisting on working on the very same show, whether it is traveling or within the same institution or city. Now, one could argue that this is what a lot of curators are already doing, regardless of the fact that they might change topics, scenes and generations regularly; but rather than dismissing or hiding this fact, I would suggest articulating it, and through this self-imposed and self-transformative continuity, going deeper into the artists’ production and thinking, as the artists then would with the curator’s thinking and methods, as well as developing – quite literally, and for better or for worse – long-term relationships with one’s imagined audience, constituency and/or community. Producing a public is making a world. It is also making other ones possible…