The exhibition of Julie Béna, a French artist active on the Czech scene, gives an impressive overview of the main themes permeating her work to date.

In the world of commedia dell’arte, pantomime, cabaret and circus, in the world of fairy tales, as well as in animated movies, blockbusters and computer games, the characters are portrayed in clear strokes so as to be recognisable at first sight. Their character does not evolve, but represents a distinct attitude, mood and destiny. They go through the plot in one costume. We know what to expect from them. They act in order to make us follow the plot, the situational wit, the execution. We don’t bother about where they came from. However, their lack of ambiguity is disturbing in itself. Considering that they should be perfectly elegant, what if there is a toe sticking out of their sock? 

The poetics of emancipation in Julie Béna’s work, however, conceive her characters and their archetypes in the context of their former critical function, when such an artificial fairy tale or cabaret were spaces for radical questioning of the social order. In other cases, it reveals and questions the mechanisms that instil socially conforming ideas about the roles assigned to individuals. The exhibition of the French artist Julie Béna, who lives between Paris and Prague and teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, looks back at the basic characters and figures that have accompanied her during the twenty years of her creative practice, and develops their world in a series of new large-scale objects and a brand-new film, Dirty Shirley.

AN EXHIBITION BY ROBIN PHOENIX WHITEHOUSE AND TODOR RABADZHIYSKI

16 may – 27 june 2024

“Lobsters in the sea, its climbed the economic ladder,
rising from the ocean’s depths,
food for poor people and prisoners, all the way to a
fancy restaurant, portraying high-class toxic hierarchies.
But what have the Lobsters felt?
They’ve been boiled and cut from their back to the tip of
their tail
they’ve been snapped and cracked, squished and licked,
sucked from their strong shell transformed into the idea
of hedonism and affluence.”
— Robin Phoenix Whitehouse and Todor Rabadzhiyski

“Lobster and shrimp on my plate, I need my pockets so fat they inflate” is a durational project that started three years ago and delves into the culture and changing economy associated with lobsters. In the third showcase of their ongoing project at Swimming Pool, artists Robin Phoenix Whitehouse (UK) and Todor Rabadzhiyski (BG) are looking at how the lobster has been reinvented through the ages, considering how marketing has portrayed a certain image of the lobster that is becoming an analogy for the current time.

The industrial developments in the late 1800s slowly led to lobsters’ wider appreciation and heightened status. With the introduction of railway and tinned goods, lobsters could be caught and transported to cities inland and eaten by a completely different group to the coastal communities who lived off its abundance. In “Vol. 3: Transportation”, the artists are focusing on the import and export in trade that affect the position of lobster in contemporary culture. The exhibition covers a wide range of media – from sculpture, painting and video to installation built by the physical presence of lobsters. Paintings and prints show a somewhat romanticized timeline of the animal, starting as a historical art reference and leading to hypothetical depictions of it in the future. Plastic fish boxes have been collected by the artists from ports in The Netherlands into which their aluminum lobsters have been packed and transported across Europe in the back of vans. The artistic use of aluminum for casting refers to the materials that facilitated the change in the status of the object: tin cans, industry and mechanism of transportation facilitate the distribution of millions of lobsters across the world. For the occasion of the exhibition, 50 kg of lobster remains from a high class seafood restaurant in The Netherlands have been displayed at Swimming Pool. First frozen in the artists’ studio, then they are bundled into suitcases and flown together with Robin and Todor to Sofia.

Opening: May 24, 2024 7pm
On view: May 25–Juni 9

The solo exhibition “Great Stone” by Lesia Pcholka explores a hypothetical assumption of how Belarus is changing as it becomes part of China’s new Silk Road. Lesia Pcholka is a visual artist born in Belarus, now living in Berlin. Her artistic practice includes photography, video, installations, and archival work. Through research-based work, Pcholka examines collective memories from the Soviet past and those of today, reflecting on the pressing social issues and processing political trauma.

https://a-lesia.com/

The exhibition is a part of the Independent Space Index Festival 2024, May 31–June 2 
Opening hours during the festival: 2–6pm
June 1, 4pm: Lesia Pcholka in conversation with Michaela Geboltsberger

Alternative opening hours: June 7, 4–6pm, and June 8, 12–4pm, and by appointment

On June 6, 2023, Russian troops blew up the Kakhovka reservoir dam, committing yet another war crime during their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Social and environmental consequences of this event will become clear only in the future. Meanwhile, we want to return to the past in order to examine the processes brought about by Soviet modernization: the construction of a cascade of hydroelectric power plants on the Dnipro and the ideological reenvisioning of Ukraine’s water resources.

Along with other megalomaniacal Soviet projects, the construction of the HPPs, especially of the Dnipro hydroelectric station (1927–1932), was widely publicized in films and interpreted by many artists including Dzyga Vertov, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Ivan Kavaleridze, Arnold Kordium and Yulia Solntseva. Occasionally, Ukrainian Soviet films went beyond presenting positive images of large-scale construction sites and revealed pre-modern forms of human coexistence with rivers as well as the negative consequences of the industrial exploitation of water bodies.

Today’s tragedy gives us an impetus to think about the way the subjugation of the Dnipro was represented in cinema and ask pertinent questions about our future coexistence with rivers and seas. It also calls on us to look for subtle ways of “decolonizing nature” against the background of Ukraine’s political decolonization and liberation from Russian occupation and imperial influence.

https://dniproccc.org/en-US/agenda/vistavka-rika-krichala-vila-yak-poranenii-zvir

“On loss” is a collective exhibition of Ukrainian artists, curated by Nikita Kadan. The artist has been working in the residence of the Lviv Municipal Art Center since June. This exhibition is the result of Kadan’s stay at our institution and the realization of the planned exhibition project in the gallery of the Center.

Authors: Yevgenia Belorusets, Open Group, Oleg Holosiy, Alla Horska, Nikita Kadan, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimey, Margaryta Polovynko, Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachynskiy, Fedir Tetyanych.

The curator about the exhibition “Regarding loss”: “This exhibition is about life-in-loss. Not a list of losses, not a mourning, but an attempt to capture the state of constant loss as such and give it form and voice. Losses become milestones on the historical path, whereas any accumulation is usually ahistorical. It is doubtful and impure, only loss is pure. The lost creates an alternate canon, treasures gathered in heaven.“

Vlatka Horvat’s Good Company presents a selection of works from the museum’s Sculpture collection through the lens of the artist’s practice.

In the space of the exhibition, small groups of works from different eras and artistic movements are placed in dialogue with each other. Figurative pieces and abstract works sit side by side, and their spatial arrangements underscore contrasts and connections between different formal gestures and sculptural materials. Horvat’s selection and presentation of works offers a playful, dynamic view of the grouped sculptures, their relations, connections and possible interpretations.  

Alongside the installation of works in space, Horvat has made an experimental wall-based publication in the form of seven new collages. These works respond to and deploy reference photographs of artworks taken from the collection database, creating sequences of images that link works via visual equivalences and contrasts, regardless of their scale. Staging morphological transformations from image to image, the work invites us to ask questions about how we understand the world through different forms of categorization and organization.

Relations that emerge between the works in the exhibition Good Company become a metaphor for relations within actual social structures. Affinities and connections, as well as differences and contrasts, are all at work in this loose assembly, raising questions about belonging and being together, sharing space and the idea of community.

Vlatka Horvat is an artist working across a wide range of forms, from sculpture, installation, drawing, collage and photography to performance, video, writing and publishing. Reconfiguring space and social relations at play in it, her projects often rework the precarious relationship between bodies, objects, materials, the built environment and landscape. Her work is presented internationally in a variety of contexts – in museums and galleries, performance venues and festivals, and in public space, and is held in numerous public and private collections in Europe, North America and Asia. After spending twenty years in the US where she moved to as a teenager, she currently lives in London, and teaches in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts London.

 www.vlatkahorvat.com

Puccs Contemporary Art

Hundun is a faceless being representing primal and fertile chaosin the Daoist tale of the Zhuangzi. Its story implies themes such as the relationship between society and the individual, the tendency of the majority to uniformise against those who are different from them. The fact that the originally amorphous shape of Hundun is being reduced to an anthropomorphic figure by a tight suit as a classic type of uniform points out ironically the narrowing of individuality and creative potential.

Several clothes hangers bear the label VOR, an abbreviation standing for Red October Garment Factory. The factory of the Hungarian socialist era is not just historically interesting: the socialist work ethos, the glorification of over-achievement and the notion of accumulation in the installation provide an opportunity to reflect on the unsustainability of our consumer culture as well.

Violetta Vigh, Media Design student at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, is interested in different forms and technologies of media art, searching for ways to express a phenomenon, concept or story in visual metaphor. She is interested in interdisciplinary and research-based projects, such historical and sociological topics like the emergence of the heliocentric worldview, the history of aviation technology, the changing roles of women in society during the great witch-hunts or the cultural impact of the music programme of Radio Free Europe.

www.violettavigh.com

Puccs Contemporary Art
Address: 1084 Budapest, Víg u. 22.
Opening hours: 0-12 pm