SEFO Triennial 2024: MOMENTS

The Triennial of Contemporary Central European Culture and Art is a format prepared by the Olomouc Museum of Art as part of the programme of the Central European Forum (SEFO). The Museum has long been researching the geographic and significantly unstable region of Central Europe and focusing its acquisition activities on it. The Triennial is an opportunity to cross the boundary of the history of old and modern art towards contemporary art, without which reflection on the phenomenon of Central Europe would not be complete.

CONCEPT/

The SEFO 2024 Triennial is a continuation of the first edition, which took place in 2021 and was subtitled UNIVERSUM. Its aim was to search for and examine possible connections and fixed points in the structure of the world we live in. The general validity of the temporal and spatial dimension of UNIVERSUM is concretised in the SEFO 2024 Triennial, whereby time and space are grasped through art-historical categories. We observe art, architecture, and their environments in real time, but with an emphasis on the modes of historicity and interpretive frameworks that are, or have been, attributed to them.

The timeline in retrospect and in prospects for the future offers many MOMENTS when the fixed points that are chosen, analysed, and named lose their validity and stability, when they undergo a change of perception, acceptance, or even crisis. The objects we focus on in the SEFO 2024 Triennial are represented by a set of terms borrowed from the art historian, theorist, and curator Octavian Eşanu. His triad Monument-Document-Mockument is adapted and measured in the Triennial concept by the current concept of the moment.

MOMENTS do not represent only impermanent points on the timeline for us, they also allow us to explore and compare experiences, long processes, and critical turns. The Triennial wants to work with those moments when we touch our own history and memory and when we construct their image through art and architecture.

• MONUMENTS, in the Triennial concept, represent the supposed certainties of the past and the present. Let us imagine memorials, monuments, and entire protected complexes as products of social agreements or historical constructs, let us examine objects that are worthy and unworthy of protection, tangible and intangible, materialised memory and its care or lack thereof.
• The tools we use to systematise the knowledge of memory (and at this point we touch directly on the essence of the organising institution) are covered by the term DOCUMENT.
• The instrument of the experiment is MOCKUMENT, which introduces mystification or irony into the interpretive processes, questioning myths based on the reality of previously unambiguous facts.

QUESTIONS/

Can we free ourselves from the past and see ourselves in the present moment and on the current scale? Which moments from the present do we want to project into the future? Which holes or cracks of today will the future show us? What form should the monuments of today take and is this even a topic? What else are we going to protect? What are the pitfalls of archiving the present and what will be the role of the past in the future?

STRUCTURE/

We are preparing the Triennial as a collective exhibition project consisting of a series of interconnected monographic and thematic parts. The main curatorial “axis of moments” in the premises of the Museum of Modern Art is based on the concept of MONUMENT-DOCUMENT-MOCKUMENT. Each chapter is represented by artistic personalities in whose work the theme resonates. We invited contemporary artists from Central Europe to cooperate: Zsolt Asztalos,

Michaela Černická, Tomáš Džadoň, Andreas Fogarasi, Karolina Grzywnowicz, Martin Horák, Aglaia Konrad, Robert Kuśmirowski, Dorit Margreiter Choy, Ilona Németh, Tobias Putrih, Martin Zet, Vojtěch Radakulan, Ala Savashevich, Matěj Smetana, Jakub Tajovský, Tomáš Vaněk, and others.

With the help of archival probes from our own collections and dialogues with them, we will refine the topic. An exemplary art-historical probe will arise from the cooperation and interaction of the Olomouc Museum of Art with the Kunstmuseum Bochum (DE), which has an important collection of Central European art from the second half of the 20th century.

Further key partners of the Triennial with a focus on architecture, urbanism, shared spaces, and conservation are the VI PER Gallery in Prague, the Faculty of Architecture of the Brno University of Technology, the University of Applied Arts, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

The Triennial will be complemented by the dramaturgical line-up of the newly-opened Central cultural space in the Olomouc Museum of Art, while the non-exhibition programme will appear in a number of locations outside the museum. The Triennial and its theme will infiltrate other educational and exhibition institutions (Palacký University in Olomouc, Galerie Caesar, Galerie XY, Basement project) and festivals (Academia Film Olomouc, PAF, Divadelní Flora, The Václav Burian Award, Das Filmfest). An essential part of the Triennial is its own visual identity (Anežka Hrubá Ciglerová, Nikola Wilde, and Richard Wilde) and architectural design (Ellement).

KEY WORDS/

MONUMENT, DOCUMENT, MOCKUMENT, HISTORICITY, past PRESENT future, MOMENT, eternity, MEMORY, heritage, MONUMENT CARE/ preservation, EXPERIMENTal preservation, critical care, LIVING HISTORY, AUTHENTICITY, HISTORIC CENTRE, SETTLEMENT, SUBURBAN, SUBURBAN LANDSCAPE, PUBLIC SPACE, local – global, PROTECTION, preservation

The SEFO Triennial is being prepared by

Martina Mertová (mertova@uo.cz, +420 777 576 087) and Jakub Frank, Martin Fišr, Barbora Kundračíková, GinaRenotière, Klára Jeništová, Štěpánka Bieleszová, Ladislav Daněk, Šárka Belšíková, Miroslav Kindl, Alexandr Jeništa, Marek Šobáň, David Hrbek, Denisa Tessenyi, Hana Lamatová, Renáta Chalupová and others.