Neptune

The story of our past is not merely given. It is a complex construction of carefully interwoven narratives, forging a coherent memory and corresponding national behavior. People and parties in power have the prerogative of defining what we consider to be our history, while burying fragments which do not fit and which contradict the desired larger picture. The Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, 1989: all of those milestones of our constitutive modern historical canon are interpreted in a specific fashion which leads us to believe in simplified, almost mythologically formulated black and white struggles between opposing forces of good and evil. Neptune is presenting a series of takes on this approach from the position of contemporary artists dealing with our history, in forms which may be mainly literal or more symbolic, representing a path which leads us to our own time.

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Adéla’s Neptune is juxtaposed with works by her colleagues, utilizing them within her strategies of appropriating found material to navigate through a complex web of historical references. She groups and grounds them in the contemporary social and political climate, so as to emphasize the formative role of the past in our current discourse.

Hynek Alt is literally lifting up a sculpture of Miloš Zet, Czech sculptor active in the period of 1960s-1980s. Miloš Zet was a devoted communist, entering the party full of idealism right after the war. Changes of the political climate in the aftermath of the Prague Spring let to his expulsion in 1970. The statue, called “Young Day,” made in the same year as the Operation Neptune took place, is depicting a girl on the threshold of adolescence, full of life and energy ready to dutifully dedicate it to fulfilment of her role in building a new, just and positive future. […] Through the collaboration of Hynek and Miloš Zet’s son Martin (also an artist), a plaster cast of “Young Day”, stored in Miloš Zet’s studio for decades, was given a new life opportunity in Hynek’s appropriation, called simply “Untitled (Young Day)”, 2018. By bounding the sculpture in transport straps and elevating it above the ground, giving it a sensation of weightlessness and levitation on the one hand, on the other a feeling of transfer or contingency of a new meaning, Hynek writes a next chapter in the life of this historical form.

The binding that holds the sculptures in place is carefully recreated, using a series of documentary images of various historical artworks prepared for a shipment. The original concept behind “Untitled” placed it on a darkened stage in a theatre for a brief span of one minute, presenting it almost as a spectre of its challenging past. As part of Neptune, the object receives the attention of the exhibition format, an intact place in time and space. The fact of levitation nevertheless displaces this status into an endless transition. As if the course of history were be halted in a single glimpse of a second, motionless, stuck in a movement of a minute hand which is not going forward any more, repeatedly announcing an uncanny revelation that time is no more.