The Notice Board Project/SEFO 2021 Triennial
What happens the moment you pin a magazine clip, a slip of paper with a phone number, a quote from a book, or a photo of your children on a bulletin board over your desk? What kind of relationship do these objects become involved in, how do they communicate with each other and what does the information on the bulletin board tell you? And what if this bulletin board does not hang above your desk, where its arrangement is often a coincidence and its message is rather private, but in the lobby of the city library or at a companys gatehouse, where it serves to inform everyone who visits the place?
The Notice Board project is being prepared by the Olomouc Museum of Art in cooperation with the Pictures Across Disciplines Association, which has long been involved in visual culture by monitoring the role that pictures and visual information play in contemporary society. The Notice Board is an artistic intervention in public space. Its aim is not merely to appropriate hanging message spaces in the sense of a presentation tool, but to highlight their potential as an inconspicuous yet ubiquitous information medium with specific aesthetic rules. It is a play of composition and content, i.e., the emphasis on the formal qualities of the medium, that shifts the utilitarian function of notice boards into the field of art in public space.
We perceive the bulletin board as a distinctive type of visual interface capable of transformation, from wall newspapers in the style of a socialist stěngazeta (wall magazine), through profiles of workers of the week to the investigative boards employed by detectives and conspirators. We foster this diversity both by choosing locations (e.g., university dormitories, hospital vestibule, company canteen) and by focusing and an artistic conception that presupposes traditional “message board techniques” of cork and pin as well as modern projection, e.g., using digital media.
The project is one of the installations through which the Triennial moves from the institutional framework to the public space and enriches the exhibition format with the element of an everyday random encounter with art in unusual or, in contrast, completely common places. Its author is Tomáš Kolich, art historian, theorist, publicist and founder of the Pictures Across Disciplines Association.
curator: Tomáš Kolich, Jakub Frank