MONUMENT TO TRANSFORMATION
DURING 38 SECONDS OF THE TRANSFORMATION
2008
Slide projection, 78 slides
concept: Zbyněk Baladrán & Vít Havránek
The diaporama follows three levels of looking at transformation. A body: integral body that doesn´t change in this short period of time. A view on a living room: „familiar 4 walls” that don’t undergo any kind of transformation during the selected moment. Feeling of intimacy as well as loneliness. A flux of reflections passing through my/your/our head/s about the huge, invisible transformations of society.
Monument of Transformation* (MT) is a long-term installation of artworks and theoretical reflections focused on the topic of cultural, social and political “transformation”. It attempts to redefine the existing geopolitical delimitations in favor of an existential experience of the process of transformation from different sides of the globe. MT is an imaginative and analytical space, a distance that allows us to seize and reflect a process we are still, to some extent, temporally a part of - a process of social transformation. At its beginning, there was a desire, perhaps naïve and direct in a way, to answer the question: “What happened in the Czech Republic over the twenty years that followed the fall of the communist regime (1989-2009)?”
However, we soon had to conceive of the process of thinking about transformation in a structured manner, spanning the methods of several of social sciences and artistic practices. As we did so, we realized that in this case our local experience with transformation and the theory through which we understood it, along with the methods we used to approach it, were forming an independent discipline. In the context of transformation studies, the heterogeneous region known as Eastern Europe has no unique identifying trait; at the same time, the term is too restricting. That is why we chose a global perspective to investigate and understand the transformational phenomena - we believe it would be more beneficial to engage in transformational reflections based on well-defined characteristics in regions such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Central America and Southeast Asia. We think that by formulating specific global transformational phenomena, we can deconstruct the stigmatic construction of so-called “Eastern Europe” which for the past few years has been a self-reflecting construction with no content. Thus, a new parallel map of the world of transformation has emerged.
Our project is specific in that it methodically confronts theoretical thought and different forms of artistic expression. This is why we decided to use the formulation: “a space which captures the interaction created between individual components”. In the tranzitdisplay space in Prague we are creating a changing, growing space for MT; in each exhibition space we are testing fragments - creating interdisciplinary approaches, with regards to both form and content - to an “installation space”.
Relatively recently, as a result of a study of methods of transformation, we decided that a key methodical starting point for the MT project would be a dictionary and its adaptation into book, video, exhibition and speech forms, to name a few. The idea of a DICTIONARY or GLOSSARY in this frame means a collection of significant terms defining a certain field of knowledge. We find the project’s dictionary-based, non-linear, multi-method organization to be exceptionally suitable, as it makes it possible to develop usage on different levels, in layers and themes that need not have one globalizing, governing hypothesis apart from the transformational identity itself. The dictionary can be contradictory and contain different definitions of both theoretical and artistic processes that stand in relations of tension and disagreement. Thanks to its open character, it is amenable to constant additions; it precludes a linear reading and generates hypertextuality - dynamic links in the construction of the text.
(Z.B.& V.H.)
*Monument of Transformation is a project supported by the ERSTE Foundation.
ZBYNĔK BALADRÁN (1973, Prague, CZ) studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts, and art history at the Charles University in Prague. In 2007 he was one of the finalists for the Jindrich Chalupecky Award; in 2006 he was the artist-in-residence in Museums Quartier 21 in Vienna by Tranzit, in 2004 participant of Manifesta 5. His work has been shown in venues such as Apexart, New York; Prague Biennial, Prag; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Galerija Nova, Zagreb; Futura, Prague; Brno House of Arts, Brno; Trafo Gallery, Budapest. He was one of the co-founders of the Prague Display gallery (later transformed into tranzitdisplay) that presented its first exhibition in 2001 and was focused on presenting international contemporary art.
VIT HAVRÁNEK is a theoretician and organizer based in Prague, Czech Republic. Since 2002 he has been working as a project leader of the initiative for contemporary art tranzit (www.tranzit.org), since 2007 he is the director of tranzitdisplay, resource center for contemporary art. He is a guest lecturer on contemporary art at the Academy of Applied Arts, Prague. He has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions and projects, including: tranzit - Auditorium, Stage Backstage, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; I, series of exhibitions in three acts (Secession Vienna, Futura Prague; The Need to Document (Basel, Luenenburg, Prague), Definitions of Everyday (Prague Biennale 2), etc. He is editor of the tranzit series published by jrp | ringier (Jan Mančuška, Katerina Šedá, Jiří Kovanda and others), and has edited and co-edited several books and written articles for contemporary art magazines (Springerin, Artist, Flash Art and others). He is based in Prague.
