Exhibition talk
Anna Hulačová: Eating Planet and Jaromír Novotný: Other Things Held Constant

ATTENTION: Dear visitors, we would like to inform you that the exhibition talk will be conducted only by curator Marika Svobodová. Jaromír Novotný will join another exhibition talk on September 8. The time of the talk was also changed - we will look forward to meeting you at 5 pm, not 6 pm. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your understanding.

An exhibition talk about Anna Hulačová's exhibition Eating Planet and Jaromír Novotný's exhibition Other Things Held Constant will take place on Wednesday, September 1, 2021 from 5 pm in House of Arts Brno. The exhibitions will be presented by curator Marika Svobodová.

Entrance fee: 20 CZK

Event participants must meet one of the following three conditions:
- at least 14 days have elapsed since the 2nd dose of vaccination
- suffering from COVID-19 (immunity is valid for 180 days)
- negative POC antigen test not older than 72 hours or negative PCR test not older than 7 days, testing is not required for children under 6 years

ANNA HULAČOVÁ: EATING PLANET

The subject of the latest sculptural work by Anna Hulačová (b. 1984), created for the exhibition at the Brno House of Arts, is agriculture, or rather its current state, contributing largely to a deepening of the ecological and environmental crises and its impact on our planet. The title of the exhibition Eating Planet critically refers to the aspects of modern agriculture targeting a significant increase in production and consumption leading to depletion and extensive devastation of the soil and the environment and disturbing the natural relationship to land and food.

The installation of freely composed figurative concrete sculptures is approached by Anna Hulačová as a special kind of symbiosis or a hybrid integration of man and machine (specifically agricultural or technological devices). The stylised human figures devoid of individualised features resemble mechanised automatons interconnected with the machines they operate. Formally they refer to the interwar sculptural social civilism where the theme of the union of man and technology was perceived as a positive utopian gesture; references to modernist abstraction are also evident, primarily in surfaces with linear drawing creating a contrast to the full sculptural form. We can also find references to socialist realism with its subjects of labour and a unified collectivised society. The layering and combining of these equivocal motifs from the past leads us down the trail of the relationship between man and technology, which regardless of the utopian vision has become a tool for the devastation of nature. All of these aspects, which in today‘s world take the form of centralisation, close links with the latest technologies, genetic engineering and replacement of humans by robots in the near future, take a course leading rather to a dystopian scenario, but above all show the cycle of production and consumption against the backdrop of a wider context and historical background.

JAROMÍR NOVOTNÝ: OTHER THINGS HELD CONSTANT

The exhibition of Jaromír Novotný Other Things Held Constant presents a collection of new creations by the artist in the abstract monochrome domain. The works – mainly paintings, but also photograms, plaster-of Paris pieces and two videos from the last year – were conceived with regard to the arrangement of the spaces in the Brno House of Arts. They can be viewed both independently and within the framework of their relationships, contexts and installation design as a single whole in terms of composition and meaning. Each of the five exhibition rooms provides space for developing one chosen theme, whereby the link common to all represents subtle changes against the background of something deliberately invariable. Repeating a particular approach, slight shifts in the relationship between two elements in a painting, inevitability of their position, moving only within a limited range, creates imperceptible variations in the paintings or works in the individual rooms. More significant differences can be spotted only after moving between the rooms, but at the same time we perceive a link with the central theme that the works always return to, albeit in different ways. A parallel to the subject matter developed by the exhibition is a method used in mathematics, economics and other social sciences called ceteris paribus (lat. for all other things being equal), to which the exhibition title refers. It examines the impact of a single variable on the result, assuming that the other variables remain unchanged.