Maps

An international exhibition project called Mapy/Maps (Art cartography in the centre of Europe 1960-2011) presents both well-known and so far never displayed works of artists who worked in the sixties and seventies at conceptual art and land-art, in the eighties also at painting and photography and it also reflects neo-conceptual trends of an object and an installation in the nineties. The selection also presents a young generation of artists who use maps and the principle of mapping, networks, roads, thinking and research with the help of a map as a metaphor for the artwork itself. In the past 50 years, maps in art became an important medium of a cultural meaning such as medium of utopian visions, mental archaeologies, futurological projects or projections of territorial or political frustrations. The exhibition shows that maps in contemporary art act as a reflection of a discourse on a geopolitical area in Central Europe. In an art historic probe, the exhibition follows on a “map” of artworks more than fifty artists and their attitude to everyday reality, from interdigitation of art and life in neo avant-garde tendencies in the sixties to frigidly straightforward manifestation of life in art allowed by new media. It maps cartographic interpretations in Slovakian art and confronts them with artists from other countries of V4 – the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. The exhibition is made chronologically and at the same time topically. The exhibited works show the artists’ reflection on borderlines, limitations, ways of their virtual and free crossing or redefinement, changes of scale or position of states and continents. The artists depict in the maps experience with their physical presence in landscape and orientation in a city or countryside. But art maps are a vehicle of subjective mental cartography. Metaphorical base of a map provides endless possibilities of expressing in creative systems of individual mythologies, looking for lost paradise and discovering the mythical one, founding new lands or dreaming about space. Each artist marks with his inscription primarily his own coordinates. Accompanying catalog is made as an atlas of art maps with referencies, topics and instructions how to read them critically.