Mutating Medium / Mutující Médium - Photography in Czech art 1990-2010

The exhibition captures the metamorphosis of photography as artistic media in the dynamic environment of the past two decades influenced by sweeping political changes and technological development aimed at mass digitalization and the democratization of image media.

The key question that the exhibition asks is what exactly happened with “photography” as art in those 20 years. It therefore does not focus on investigating all of the surviving genres of photography, but rather on the appearance of all of its new mutations which often exceed its present borders.

Since the 1990’s, the use of photography in modern art has been fundamentally democratized: as an artistic medium, photography has been gradually liberated from the isolation given by its technicist professional essence. During the past two decades, we have been able to view the divergence from the modernistic vision of photography to post-conceptual formulated creation. In the field of themes and subjects, the emphasis now moves from the reflection (either interior or exterior) of facts to its more structured description: photography adopts the languages of poetry, sociology, psychology and mass media. The exhibition thereby captures the gradual metamorphoses and variations of photography: from postmodern exaggerations through the conceptual approaches of the 1990’s up to the most modern works which investigate the essence of photographic media itself. Even from the view of other artistic approaches (painting, installation, performance), the exhibition implies the metamorphosis of the perception of photography as bearer of social and cultural content.

The exhibition will present around 150 works from 20 authors and two author pairs who work directly and indirectly with photography and related media.
Exhibited artists

Zbyněk Baladrán, Pavel Baňka, Veronika Bromová, Jiří Černický, Milena Dopitová, Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, Václav Jirásek, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Jiří Kovanda, David Možný, Markéta Othová, Michal Pěchouček, Ivan Pinkava, Daniel Pitín, Štěpánka Šimlová, Václav Stratil, Antonín Střížek, Jiří Surůvka, Jiří Thýn, Filip Turek, Aleksandra Vajd and Hynek Alt

Curator: Pavel Vančát


Author of the texts / exhibition curator: Pavel Vančát
Graphic design: Markéta Kinterová
Editor: Pavel Baňka