Photography, Reconstructed

00:00–00:20 [Intro / Titles] PragueBiennalePhoto 3 · Photography, Reconstructed · Curator: Pavel Vančát · Freight Railway Station, Prague, Czech Republic, 6.7.–15.9.2013

00:06–00:16 [Setup, off-camera audio in Czech] "To se vším... Že ta krása..." "Ale ještě bych se byl... Jestli můžu, tak bych zaostřil tady na tohleto a na tohleto. A na mě teda zpředu." "Jo."

00:21–01:06 Pavel Vančát: I felt quite lucky that from the organizers I had quite free hands in choosing the concept and the topic, and I would say even the topic of this exhibition linked to some other exhibitions I did before where I was also kind of questioning the substance of photography and its temporary or contemporary state. And I would say this is one more step further being a little bit more international, tracking these major changes in perceiving photography and perceiving the way photography is constructed instead of captured.

01:07–01:45 If I should describe these contemporary tendencies, and these are really tendencies which are, might be a little bit avant-garde nowadays, and, but I think they are so progressive that they already make some kind of tendency. Definitely this is not the first exhibition which considers this question of photography after modernism, there's been many, many others before. So, I would say the basic thing is that they're leaving this single pictorial perspective, in fact the Renaissance perspective, using the technical advice of the camera, which then reproduces the world, and...

01:45–02:38 ...instead of that, they are working with broader perspective where there are more pictures which are creating one image. There are more perspectives which then make the final artwork. There are artworks which can speak about the state of photography itself, about its conditions, about its possibilities, and this kind of self-reflecting photography is, even though it's running from late 1960s, like you can see in the work of Jan Svoboda who is also here in the exhibition, so it's getting more and more broad and more and more intensive. And as I said, I'm having feeling that in last, let's say, 5 years, this tendency has become more and more visible in contemporary art using photography.

02:39–02:52 Well, in this space which is beautiful by itself as an... as an empty form, and which as I talked about Václav Kopecký, can be even considered even as kind of large camera itself.

02:53–03:10 So, the exhibition has a kind of introductory section in the beginning, just one long wall where I'm kind of posing some questions to the spectator using kind of weird, questionable confrontations of very different works placed next to each other.

03:11–03:44 And then, in this large space which I was trying to make as simple and as easy to overview from one point as possible, I'm kind of putting together next to each other all the different approaches I was able to find during this like a half a year research I did on the subject not only in Czech Republic, but in fact international.

03:40–03:49 [Outro / Credits] camera, edit: Jan Vidlička · Artyčok.TV 2013