At present Jan Boháč is a doctoral student in the studio of sculpture led by Edith Jeřábková and Dominik Lang at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He studied in this studio and exhibited his diploma work in 2015 in the gallery Kostka. His work was entitled Report of Sheheresada´s Brother and dealt with topics related to communication, speach, messages and possibilities of understanding. These topics have been present in his work for a long time and are closely related to his job of an emergency call handler. Sheheresada´s brother in the artist´s diploma work was a metaphor of a man calling an emergency line and describing what was happening around.
Another project which was again related to the artist´s job experience was called May I? (2017), realized in the Gallery UM. It was a spacious installation, where visitors could move freely, and were approching a moment of decision making like an emergency call operator who is asked to give an approval. This project was meant to draw attention to the vanishing border between help and manipulation. An accompanying program was a first aid lesson which took place in the gallery. The topic of emergency calls also appeared in the project Tranzitdispečink (Transitdispatching), which won the students´award of the Tranzitdisplay initiative. Boháč together with other artists working on the project – Barbora Fasrová, Pavel Jestřáb and Anna Ročňová – set up an art call center in the gallery where people could call art historians and art theoreticians and ask them questions related to current exhibitions or art in general.
In 2018 Jan Boháč and Jonáš Richter introduced their project Silné a slabé karty (Strong and Weak Cards) in the Pragovka Gallery. Spacious objects, such as a sword and target, symbolizing a fight, invited visitors to enter the installation. Paradoxically the sword was a quiet place where people could have a rest and re-evaluate the starting-points of an individual. The installation dealt with a burning theme of the disunion and polarization of society and called for thoughtful action with detachment. Jan Boháč coopeated with Richter and Jakub Červenka also a year earlier in GAMU where they made a site-specific installation
and where the movement of viewers through the installation was again of utmost importance.
Jan Boháč prepared solo-exhibitions for the Entrance Gallery (Eternal Fire, Sad4, Žižkov Atrium (Infection, 2017), and he also took part in many group exhibition in the Czech Republic and abroad.
Natálie Drtinová
