The authors, Ivan Pinkava and Vojtěch Míča, belong to the breakthrough generation, who experienced the last stage of totalitarianism, its fall and the euphoria of restored freedom. It seems that this life has contributed to both a sensitive and a sober relationship to the question of freedom and its associated cultural identity. These moments can be found somewhere in the most basic layers of their work.

The oeuvres of Ivan Pinkava and Vojtěch Míča problematize the seemingly clear and by all accounts the once and for all resolved questions of the human identity and the world in which a person as a living being is forced to live. They both reopen, overturning the truths about this “arena”, to free the space for the development and deepening of human knowledge and freedom. In Pinkava, a person changes himself into a “material” which is modeled over time and later shown as the result of some processes which prevent human consciousness from comprehending. With Miča, they are human prints and traces of spiritual activities that revive matter and free it from the cosmic cold. The photographs and sculptures are a manifestation of belonging as a dialogical form in which the basic human feeling is cleansed – the feeling of loneliness and solitude – from the state of unbearableness that produces a pure self-negation in the opposite direction to an understanding of one’s own situation that is also common to all of us.

curator: Petr Vaňous