Finalists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award are exhibiting at DOX

Prague - The Holešovice Center for Contemporary Art DOX will be in the spotlight of contemporary art lovers for the following weeks. It is hosting the works of this year's five finalists of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Visitors can not only choose their favorite and guess the new laureate, but also catch a glimpse of where young contemporary Czech art is heading. The joint exhibition Finale 2011, featuring Dominik Lang, Filip Cenek, Jiří Thýn, Marek Ther, and Pavel Sterec, will be on display in the gallery until January 15.
    In the recently renovated new spaces of the gallery, visitors will find a total of five individual installations by five Czech artists. The exhibition includes conceptual art, a raw film straddling the line between fiction and documentary, installations in the form of museum showcases, and Wobbly Cinema, which combines several seemingly unrelated images. "I wanted the installation to hint at the subject of my interest, which is storytelling in cinema. In the projection, however, I work with asynchronous images and text and with the randomness it brings," said CTK author Filip Cenek, who was greatly limited by the space while preparing the installation. In the gallery, he had only a dark room measuring a few square meters.
    On the other hand, Dominik Lang could not complain about a lack of space, as he represented the Czech and Slovak Republic at the contemporary art biennale in Venice this year. In the gallery, Lang presents his construction, the floor plan of which is determined by a massive clay wall. According to the author, it is a collage of his unfinished works and projects, and the displayed objects, drawings, small sculptures, and sketches will hint to the viewer "what happens before the exhibition begins."
     A raw film about lost children in the former Sudetenland was prepared for the exhibition by Marek Ther, an artist focused on video art. He introduced his film Wandering Star with the words: "The entire film is narrated by the voice of a nearly ninety-year-old witness. Some viewers may be shocked or disgusted, but I have already distanced myself. Maybe if I hadn't been part of the filming and hadn't seen the film several times, a tear would have slipped down my cheek."
     The neighboring installation was handled by Pavel Sterec, who literally created a museum atmosphere in the gallery. His project consists of a glass showcase where Sterec placed a real piece of meteorite against a stalagmite growing upwards. Both were lent to the artist by the National Museum. "Between the two objects, an imaginary intersection is created, a vertical - a stalagmite continuously growing from the earth and a meteorite unexpectedly falling from the sky," explains his vision Sterec.
     The final part of the exhibition belongs to Jiří Thýn, who played with the endless possibilities of photography. In his project, he reflects on abstraction in photography and attempts to translate the medium of photography into space while capturing the process of creation. Visitors will thus find colorful photographs, games with refracted light and its color spectra in his "section."
     The five-member international jury will announce the name of this year's winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award on November 25, right in the Holešovice gallery DOX.