Tomáš Svoboda
Like in a Movie: Adaptation

The exhibition is inspired by Tomáš Svoboda’s Like in a Film movie (2017) examining narrative procedures and semantic and syntactic levels of film. It is based on the layering of tautological perspectives linking the artist, the audience and the narrator. In short, it focuses on thinking about film, and at the same time on thinking through film. It transfers an ingenious analysis of relationships between reality and illusion, as well as conceptions from the film medium (experimental feature film) intended for projection in cinemas, into a gallery installation. The dissolving of initial codes in a new whole brings several fascinating moments: for example, a different dimension of “place and time” linked at the exhibition to the unique “here and now”; a transfer of a chronological sequence of narration into a parallel constellation and translations of the language of film and visual art. Contemporary art abounds in intense – and often also mechanical - arguments for originality, novelty and the site specific; this is another reason why we want to create a (seeming) diversion in the form of visual adaptation of a film.

However, the mentioned point of departure of Tomáš Svoboda’s film does not restrict the autonomy of the exhibition project which analyses the subjects of memory, thinking and narration. The title of the exhibition can be related to the dictionary definition of “adaptation” as a “change in the sensitivity of sensory organs depending on stimuli”, although it would be more accurate to modify this causality to a “change in stimuli depending on the sensitivity of the senses… and cultural experience.”