Jakub Šimčík
We Are Strangers. Here and There.

Jakub Šimčík was born in 1984 in Ostrava, but his family soon emigrated to Sweden. He then moved to Scotland, studied photography at the Glasgow School of Art, and later settled in Germany, where he studied between 2009–2013 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig in the Photography and Video Studio of Professor Tina Bara and in the Intermedia Studio of Professor Alba D’Urbano. He lives and works there, running together with Johanna Maxl Initiative Wort & Bild, an interdisciplinary platform for literature and art.

The exhibition titled We Are Strangers. Here and There. is dedicated to the search for the identity of one’s family, and therefore one’s own as well, to the effort to find the truth, of which from the past mere fragments remain, undiscernible from the narrators’ fictitious ideas, and to the effort to define one’s home, with the loss of which the members of the artist’s family coped in different ways.

The exhibition is held in collaboration with the Meeting Brno Festival and it is a part of the Czech-German Spring celebrations. The artist’s residency was kindly supported by the Czech-German Future Fund.