On Thursday, March 2nd, I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the most recent exhibition, ‘Kingdom of Hex,’ at Gallery MeetFactory. When I arrived, the crowd was spilling out the front doors. It seemed the entirety of Prague’s art world made the trek to the industrial site in Smichov that evening. 

Once the crowd dissipated enough to view the art, I took a cursory lap of the room. My initial impressions were of whimsy, nostalgia and longing for another world. Little rectangular paintings: a figure looking over his shoulder while wearing a pointed hood, a house on a hill underneath a gray sky, splintered shadows cast by two trees bare of leaves. Illustrations you might find in a storybook, or a fairytale. There were sculptures too: a crystal obelisk set on a wooden sled, a black porcelain vase bristling with thorns, a length of dark braided hair hanging from ceiling to floor.

I followed the sound of ambient music to the main event: the performance. Three dancers, women in sheer tights and bodysuits, contorting themselves on the floor. One wore ripped jeans, another had stones bound to her feet. I’m not quite sure how long the spectacle lasted, but I could have stood there mesmerized for hours. 

I’ll cut my recap of the artwork short here, as to prevent any spoilage of the exhibition. It will be up until mid-May and costs nothing to view. I implore you to go take a look yourself. 

This article is about more than just this opening, but the mind behind it, and the process of taking these individual works from various artists and forming an exhibition out of them. 

That is task of a curator, and I was fortunate enough to land an interview with Ján Gajdušek, the curator at Gallery MeetFactory and Kostka. So without further ado, let’s begin the discussion.

Could you tell me a little bit about what you do as a curator?

I think curating is a very complex activity. The basis of curating comes from the Latin word curare, which means to care. A curator is therefore a person who bears a very specific kind of responsibility – he or she takes care of artworks, giving them the opportunity to speak through exhibitions in a specific space and the texts he or she writes about these works and their authors. Curator is also a mediator of the ideas and messages that the art he works with carries. The curator’s responsibility also lies in the fact that he or she should be able to redirect the ideas and messages that the artworks carry towards the viewer in the best possible way. On the other hand, the curator has the power to alter these original ideas and the context of the artworks, so this work should be done with the utmost respect for the original values and ideas that the artists put into their artworks.

Did you study art in school?

Yes, I still do. Actually, before I did not. I have a bachelor’s degree in international relations. However, I decided to put myself on the path of art after I was 25 years old, I was not sure before, that this is the thing I want to do. I’m studying a Master’s programme called Theory and history of art at UMPRUM, Academy of Arts Architecture and Design in Prague and I’m actually in my last year. But still in the practical way, I’ve been doing this already for almost 10 years, as a curator.

What drew you to this profession?

Everyone’s different. And everyone has different reasons why he or she does what they do. I was actually more practically oriented. My parents are business people and sports people that are not focused on some philosophical or artistic view of the world. I was drawn to art from a very young age, but I didn’t really think about making a living as an artist until I was 25. Eventually I started working as an unpaid intern in 2013 at the Kampa Museum, where I helped out in the exhibition production department. I was so excited about the job and the art environment at the time that it was a whole new world for me, and I devoted all my energy at the time to fitting into this new-to-me art world, to understanding it, and to being a good employee for the museum. Eventually I got a full-time job at the museum, and from then on my life was basically all about art. In 2013, I also tried curating my first exhibition in a small gallery in Ostrava, which intrigued me so much that I started to exhibit and curate freelance regularly, even though I couldn’t make a living at it for a long time. But I gained enthusiasm for a certain profession and something that I find very fulfilling and enjoyable, which I lacked before…

What is your favorite part of this work?

Maybe it’s just that curating is a big adventure. I think it’s a completely different, defacto opposite job than sitting in the office of some big multinational corporation. Curating is an activity where you face a new challenge every time and you never know what your next exhibition will look like. You are always coming into contact not only with new works of art, but mainly with new people – artists who each time come up with new ideas, each time creating a unique and complex situation where we interpret to visitors a certain (artist’s) vision and understanding of the world we live in. I really enjoy co-creating these situations through exhibitions and addressing the audience with them.

How closely do you work with the artists?

In curatorial practice, there are always multiple ways of working with individual artists based on the type of exhibition. If it is a solo exhibition of an artist, the work of the curator and the artist is always the closest (of course, if it is a living artist) and the curator is always in the role of someone who tries to accommodate the artist as much as possible so that the exhibition is created mainly according to the artist’s own ideas. If it’s a collective exhibition, then most of the work goes to the curator, who stands behind the idea he wants to convey to the public through the selected artists/artworks. The curator is thus the creator of the final message and in this case does not work as closely with the artists as in a solo exhibition, for example. In general, however, I try to be as close to the artists as possible and discuss most decisions directly with them. It is important to me that they are satisfied with the result. At the same time, I regularly visit artists’ studios and try to keep up to date with what the artists are working on. But of course I can’t be everywhere in person, so an important part of this work is also a certain self-study of where the whole art scene is moving, how contemporary art is evolving, what are the reasons for these shifts, etc. Of course, it is also important to know how other galleries, especially foreign ones, are exhibiting and how other curators comment on exhibitions in their texts.

Can you tell me a little bit about your recent exhibition, ‘Kingdom of Hex’?

If I simplify it very much, the exhibition maps the current form of the trend, which is called new (or emo) romanticism. It is a very complex phenomenon that has been affecting many cultural sectors in the last 10 years or so, and fine art is just one of them. Even though it is a very current storyline that is giving way to a specific visual code that has been repeated globally, it is still a very tentative, almost fluid grasp of something that is constantly changing and the way we interpret this expression in retrospect is also changing. Art history, by its very nature, describes art retrospectively, and this temporal distance gives interpreters the opportunity to better navigate the development and more easily pick out the essential things that have had the greatest influence on that development. This approach is highly uncertain when interpreting events that take place in the “here and now” because we have no way of knowing which influences will have the greatest impact on a given development. This is why the description of these neo-romantic tendencies in contemporary art is extremely uncertain, but at the same time we can already say that this is a phenomenon/movement/direction that has already acquired global dimensions. We can look for its causes in the socio-cultural processes that have taken place in the last 10 years or so. Personally, I would say that this development is strongly linked to the rapid technological developments in the field of information technology and how and through what devices we perceive information about the outside world. The consumption of information and especially the consumption of visual information is something that has significantly changed the perception and also the work of artists in the last 10 years. The development of social platforms such as Instagram and the ability to quickly share and feed endless amounts of imagery has also transformed the way artists not only create their work, but more importantly how they subsequently present it to the public. Another cause that I perceive to be behind this trend is a growing distrust of the veracity of information – after 2015 there has been a significant erosion of trust in what we consume online, with deeper implications into the political and social consequences and the social and generational divisions of society. Consuming online content has created certain barriers where we have surrounded ourselves with our own interests and created social and virtual bubbles that have closed us off from the uncertain outside world. Depending on our interests, age, social and intellectual status, we created closed communities that we came to trust more and more and, in turn, we came to distrust more and more what was happening outside these communities. Thus we became lonely in the midst of a world of our own making. In this we can see a certain (greatly simplified) parallel with the world that surrounded artists in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, when social events in European countries were in the throes of enormous technological, social and cultural changes. The parallel can thus be seen in a certain shared sense of loneliness and ambivalence resulting from a rapidly changing world. A world that is shifting and transforming into a new form, where the old world is still material and surrounds us physically, but the new and immaterial world is already transforming our lives significantly. However, the purely visual aspect of the new romanticism is also influenced by a large number of pop culture influences, which have their origins, for example, in the return to novel fiction newly processed in series production mass consumed online through VOD platforms (e.g. the popularity of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Conjuring and others), similarly to the romanticism period, the aesthetics of decay, the disintegration of the old world and its absorption by nature is returning. Part of the inner uncertainty is also the anxiety of a world yet to come. A world that is in danger of collapse due to the irresponsible behaviour of previous generations. Some artists have also already focused on depicting the world after this apocalypse, the world after man. And perhaps it is all these uncertainties and anxieties that create the need for security, which we seek above all in ourselves, in our memories and often in the ideal world of the child viewer. The artworks thus transport us to a kind of inner therapeutic and safe zone, but one that takes a very contrasting form of fantastical, even horror-like attributes that are plucked from some untold story. We are thus alone in the seemingly safe world of our own minds. But beyond this shelter a dangerous and highly uncertain world awaits us.

Part of the process is to be informed what’s happening in other art world scenes. Not only because everything is now strongly connected, and people living here have similar experiences to people in other parts of the world and the output of their art is similar to what’s going on in these other centers of art. I had to be aware that what I am going to do here has some relation to what’s happening in other sectors of the art world. So what’s down there [the exhibition: Kingdom of Hex] is actually happening not only here in Prague, but also in Berlin, New York, in Rio de Janeiro etc.

What is the focus of your program and your future plans at MeetFactory?

This year, we’re going to have four openings of eight exhibitions in two galleries. One, the main one, and the other one is smaller, it’s called Kostka, Cube. And each of those exhibitions are going to be connected by some topic. So this one, it has the new romanticism. The next one is going to be connected with a more theoretical topic with French philosopher Bruno Latour, and his concept of actor network theory. For the next exhibition, I’m going to cooperate with Amálie Bulandrová. We are going to pick artists whose art is connected with these theoretical concepts. The third exhibition is going to be prepared by curators from the residency program of MeetFactory Piotr Sikora, Lucia Kvočáková and Flóra Gadó. The last exhibition will be a solo exhibition of Michele Gabriele, a sculptor from Milan, Italy.

When can we see the next exhibition?

The following exhibition will deal more broadly with the concept of actor-network theory, which is associated with the recently deceased French philosopher Bruno Latour. The opening is on Thursday, the eighth of June.

Is there anything you would tell our readers who are interested in learning more about the contemporary art scene in Prague?

I would recommend everyone to go to exhibitions and openings regularly, because that’s where everything is happening. Also, the art schools and their exhibitions at the end of semesters, which is AVU and UMPRUM. These are the two most important schools where the important things happen in Prague. And the rest is happening in the galleries. I would recommend to see what’s happening in the National Gallery and smaller spaces like the small galleries in Žižkov, that are surrounding Hunt Kastner, for example, 35m² and others. Also, Center for Contemporary Arts Prague at Strossmayerovo square, or MeetFactory. I think if someone really wants to be aware of what’s going on, there are so many possibilities. Just have your eyes open.