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.
- The exhibition "Maps"00:00:21.008
- focuses on cartographic themes00:00:24.640
- used mostly by conceptual artists00:00:28.096
- since 1960's, including younger authors.00:00:31.970
- The exhibition has two parts.00:00:36.226
- The first part has the title "Maps Known and Unknown"00:00:39.720
- and you'll find it at the City Gallery of Bratislava.00:00:44.471
- It presents more than 50 authors00:00:49.243
- from Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary.00:00:52.640
- Under the communist regime, many of them used maps00:00:57.726
- as a symbol of crossing borders,00:01:03.242
- which was impossible in real life,00:01:06.742
- as a tool of manipulation and creativity.00:01:10.337
- The exhibition includes works of authors00:01:14.829
- who are cartographers par excellence,00:01:18.944
- like Stano Filko, Rudolf Sikora, Peter Bartoš,00:01:22.468
- Juraj Bartusz and Otis Laubert.00:01:27.468
- This part of the exhibition00:01:37.621
- focuses on artistic and critical cartography.00:01:41.121
- Our purpose was to show how the neo-avant-garde00:01:45.791
- since the 1960's employed systems of signs00:01:51.291
- used in everyday life, such as maps, road signs,00:01:56.077
- ciphers or diagrams.00:02:00.371
- All this became a part00:02:03.378
- of the artistic expression in Central Europe.00:02:06.878
- Younger authors often make use of a different kind00:02:20.198
- of networking and mapping.00:02:25.301
- In the catalogue00:02:30.037
- we made an attempt at generalizing the situation,00:02:32.537
- albeit inaccurately,00:02:39.674
- and called the older authors "cartographers",00:02:43.107
- while the younger ones are called "searchers".00:02:47.607
- The second part of the exhibition00:02:56.780
- is situated at the Slovak National Gallery00:03:00.280
- and its title is "Maps - Unknown Areas".00:03:04.280
- It presents derived, newly created and mental maps00:03:08.376
- by authors who put maps in a larger context.00:03:13.194
- The selection also comprises utopian projects.00:03:18.543
- If we define utopian projects of new lands00:03:24.259
- as countries without territories,00:03:29.674
- there is an obvious connection00:03:33.151
- with the restricted space where the authors lived00:03:36.571
- from the 1960's until 1989.00:03:41.818
- As a bonus,00:03:45.496
- the exhibition comprising these "distorted" maps00:03:47.996
- offers several possible interpretations.00:03:52.973
- These interpretations concern not only the themes00:03:57.473
- that usually involve a certain social reality,00:04:02.850
- but also artistic styles and media used.00:04:07.415