Anglo-American University in Prague Die Früchte Group Exhibition at (A)void Gallery
I AM – I AM NOT | LIPS OF THE MEDUSA | ON THE THRESHOLD
On April 26, 2023, (A)void Gallery at Náplakva hosted a most exciting exhibition from the Die Früchte group of artists consisting of AAU professor Veronika Šrek Bromová, Veronika Drahotová, and Hanka Poislová curated by AAU professor, Karolina Dolanská.
This exhibition touched on the concept of spirit and soul – how do you strike the balance between freedoms and necessities? Can art separate the two when it comes to spirit?
Freedom and necessity are inseparable in art. Whether a traditional art piece, installation, performance or a happening, a work of art always embodies a moment when freedom and necessity are one. The point is to find the best and the only possible means to communicate what is necessary, which does not allow the artist to do anything else in any other way in each moment. Art cannot be calculated, speculated, or counted. It touches upon cultural values and historical archetypes and mythologies that exist consciously and subconsciously inside all of us, together with our connection to nature and the world of instincts, intuitions, and emotions. A work of art contains something magical, mystical, intuitive, irrational. We can never understand it fully.
Karolina Dolanská, 2023Art created by computers and artificial intelligence thus cannot replace art. It can, nonetheless, bring us new freedoms. The technocracy of rules of the “perfect” machines has in the last years become the model also for the artistic, cultural, and academic creation. No technocrat or bureaucrat, however, no matter how efficient or technically perfect, can possibly compete with the technical perfection of a machine. Artificial intelligence can produce endless numbers of infinite variations on any given topic while using all existing data and information exhaustively. It can therefore undoubtedly be the substitute for artistic and academic production as it is defined today in the name of quantity and efficiency.
Art can then come back to its own nature – a shared touch of the essence of our being. Perhaps in the form of dance, games, performances, and rituals, where the ideology of activism mixes with a carnival of costumes fused with bodies, faces with their masks, in abundance and ascesis, using everything while nothing is mandatory, balancing on a threshold and transcending, in drama, where in the Dionysia and the Bacchanalia art once began as the catalyst of social and political happenings.
Kaolina Dolanská, 2023Die Früchte are the vitamins, minerals, and spices, without which no subject or theme, however important, serious, or tragic, whether a war, ecological crisis, or the pandemics, can be communicable or absorbable: “Die Fruchte, the fruit from Paradice, vitamins for the spirit of the time.”
Need more art-spiration in your life? Catch the remaining student exhibitions here.