To the exhibition 5866 at the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery

I've been visiting GJF for more than twenty years. Some exhibitions still achieve success today, while others are quickly forgotten. I always look forward to exhibitions curated by Jakub Fišer or Filip Šenk. Each exhibitor seemingly starts from the same conditions. Occasionally, a wealthier sponsor can be secured, but you always have to deal with the same space. After dozens of openings, you can find your way to the gallery even with your eyes closed. Then a fraternal duo of native Svitavs turns everything you know upside down. Suddenly, you have to search for (old) new paths and (re)discover hidden layers. The older brother Petr (architect) and the younger Jan (sculptor) Stolín have taped up the main entrance doors with red-and-white striped tape and forced visitors to enter the gallery via the existing wooden footbridge leading from the Bethlehem Chapel. The authors originally wanted to build a temporary scaffold in the courtyard through which visitors would enter the gallery through a "rediscovered" window. In the end, they managed to find a much more prosaic and cheaper solution in the form of reopening the long-unused wooden footbridge. The authors of the installation demonstrate that society does not have to constantly build; sometimes, it is enough to look around better and start using what is readily available to us. Architects should be able to find the potential that the rest of the population overlooks. The Stolín brothers managed to find an entirely new key to the notoriously known space. It is by no means a straightforward provocation or architecture for its own sake. The Stolíns simply designed what they believe in and live by. It is not about displaying buildings using representative models or photographs, but you are directly engulfed in a spatial, light, and sound installation.
The Stolín brothers have been engaging with these themes for nearly twenty years. Their first collaborative realization, The Memorial to the Fighters and Victims for the Freedom of the Fatherland, from 2000 still stands in Štefánik Square in Liberec. This memorial bears a striking resemblance to Petr Stolín's own house in Ruprechtice, for which he received the first Czech Architecture Award in 2016. This minimalist house with an studio was also included in the GJF in 2014 as part of the exhibition Punk in Czech Architecture, where a large photograph of this duplex was attached to a structure of steel profiles directly opposite the entrance to the exhibition hall. In a similarly punk spirit, the Stolín brothers return to GJF after four years to show us all how inadequately we've been looking until now and how broad the possibilities are for exhibiting architecture.
For some architects, shaping the space plays a big role, while others emphasize construction, material, or craftsmanship. The Stolíns reminded us that there is another way, where the technological equipment of buildings can possess an aesthetics that would be a shame to hide.
The installation is a composition paying homage to high-tech and ready-made.
You can view the unique exhibition "5866 Petr Stolín Jan Stolín" at the Prague Gallery of Jaroslav Fragner until Friday, June 22, 2018. After that, the main entrance will again be used for traditional architectural exhibitions for several decades.