Sláva Sobotovičová 44 results

Sláva Sobotovičová

The exhibition Happiness Is Not for Everyone is a look at the phenomenon of self-help guides that resuscitate the myth of the strong, masculine individual who has his life firmly in his own hands. However, when we focus more closely, we see a lonely man in distress. From the constructed nature of the situation—the asynchronization and denial of the source image and sound, the speaker's hesitant yet determined diction—we can guess that this is a game with authenticity, that we are witnessing the performance of a role, the fulfillment of a task, the immersion in the state of sovereignty.
We are presenting the monumental commission for the Iranian Shah in Teheran year 1977. Before the contract was unexpectedly terminated a year later due to the coup in Iran, Czechoslovakia managed to make great profit and the then Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal acknowledged the economic contribution of Art Centrum, which was transferred in 1977 under the Federal Ministry of Foreign Trade and was thus saved from being closed down.
The curators displayed in glass show-cases toys belonging to forty artists, art theoreticians and architects who grew up in the 1970s and 80s. When we look back we realize that the exhibition was partly a serious and partly an ironic commentary of this kinship and an advance signal of the advent of the period of normalization which became a basic source for the work of a number of Czech artists after the year 2000.
The film shows the members of the art club of the Bedřich Václavek Community House in Třebíč with Antonín Kybal during their outdoor painting trip which took place in the countryside around Ptáčov in 1959. This club was founded in 1953 for mostly amateur painters and a number of professional painters were involved in their training and education.
The final outcome from the workshop was to be a personal documentary from the location. I asked the tractor train driver to move the train in front of my camera. The train offered some amazing views of the museum. And that etude with a dog in the street at the end of the video happened completely by chance. I filmed and edited the video directly in the camera. Via my walkman I added background music that blared over the museum outdoor loudspeakers. A report on the museum park was created that did not feature any actual events, places or real people. No video could match the intensity of the experience though.
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