MONUMENT TO TRANSFORMATION

participants: Zbyněk Baladrán (CZ) and W. Najvarovi, M. Pluháčkové, Z. Kročovi, M. Bisové, B. Kvetanové, A. Buršíkové, J. Švehlové, P. Švirgové, K. Štěpánkové, L. Válkové, pí Boháčkové, P. Vrbovi, Š. Mikeskové.

Moravská galerie v Brně, Husova 18, Brno /cz/, www.moravska-galerie.cz
23.3.-27.5. 2007

The author of the exhibition, Zbyněk Baladrán, calls on all who want to take part in his project to help out. He’s looking for photographs of various genres (family, documentary, newspaper, etc.), from various eras (over the past 1950s) and various formats that depict: the process of changes or change that their owner or author consider important. The photographs can also be personal and even show a different viewer invisible subtle changes (in time, the environment, of forms, employment, home, on a street, gestures, clothing, etc.). The artist perceives individual definitions of changes as the basis of the collective memory and the social conscience of that which is fundamental for human life.
An appeal for collaboration on the Table project (Monument to Transformation, Fragment # 3) made public by selected media set the framework for the intended archaeological survey by the project author being the last fifty years, location - Brno and surroundings, study material - photographs. The exhibition in the Atrium of the Pražák Palace of the Moravian Gallery in Brno represents ”a method of capturing the transformation phenomena through art. It is the third fragment of a long-term interdisciplinary project aspiring to reflect the political, cultural, social and individual changes stimulated by the transformation of Czech society during the last twenty years“.The basic prerequisite of the Brno exhibition was an interest on the part of the public in the subject and willingness to display often private and emotionally charged snapshots recording a change or the process of change. The common denominator of the individual sets was the period of their origin, easily identifiable due to seemingly unimportant secondary features (clothing, hairdo, make-up, design of objects, interiors, etc.). Although many do not capture the “breaking news”, they are equally valuable in terms of the strength of evidence they provide. They possess the ability to recollect the past through the cinematography of memories and although they are not closely related to our own lives, they reanimate the images lost under the sands of forgetfulness. We discover similarities in the records, particularly with regards to private photographs, where, as a result of the anonymity of their creators, their private nature becomes a public domain. In this way the past is made current as part of living memory. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue documenting the selected method of the memory survey and examination of the social transformation process (formulation of the advertisement, its publication, collection of material, selection).