Distant Relatives

Group International Exhibition – Czech Republic, Japan, Poland, Slovakia

We cordially invite you to the opening of the exhibition Distant Relatives, which will take place in the GS Stage City Campus gallery at Černá louka (sports building) on Thursday, August 3, 2023 at 5 pm.

Exhibiting artists: Piotr Ambroziak, Kohji Asakawa, Milan Cieslar, Tereza Čapandová, Jan Drozd, Izabela Fedorowicz, Pavel Forman, Seisuke Fujita, Andreas Guskos, Kyoko Hara, Haruo Higuma, Zbyněk Janáček, Karolina Kaleta, Takuro Kojima, Tomáš Koudela, František Kowolowski, Ireneusz Kuriata, Satoshi Machida, Yuri Matsumoto, Arkadiusz Marcinkowski, Chigusa Muro, Ayako Nishidate, Mica Nozawa, Jakub Palka, Dominik Dragos Pohludka, Jakub Pohludka, Jaroslaw Rybicki, Yasuyuki Saegusa, Marek Sibinský, Zbigniew Szot, Patrik Ševčík, Ivana Štenclová, Andrea Uváčiková, Dominika Zawojska-Kuriata, Weronika Zieziulewicz

Curators: Tomáš Koudela, Yasuyuki Saegusa, Arkadiusz Marcinkowski, Kohji Asakawa

Distant Relatives is a presentation of contemporary fine arts of artists from Japan, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, which is part of the international scientific conference InCAST 2023.

The viewer is going to be confronted with the works of fine artists, for whom creativity is a life necessity. Through creativity, artists often come up with parallel worlds, in which many of them live more intensively than in a real world.

Related: similar, same, one’s own, familiar, comprehensible, but also in the sense of view, inviting to view, as well as wild, miraculous, and admirable.

Distance: existence, being, shape, content, subject, object, idea, matter.

To be distant is a matter of a viewpoint. Affinity is a relationship of differently acting statements about the same thing. Distance is not only that which is taken and carried somewhere, just like that which acts motionless, and anticipates context. Affinity is a moment manipulated to eternity.

Distance: figurative index of traditional anthropometry or remix evoking metaphors of recent, nonetheless unfailingly forgotten visual lexicons.

Distance: discontinues time through motion to its inverse side, to its gaps.

Distance: being always in motion. The shape of this motion is the phenomenon of time, about which one could say that it adds some parallel shape to being – simplicity, as its sense or, more precisely, one of its terrible images, where sense is stripped from its own essence, it turns itself into non-sense, and this loss of motion, de-representation, the loss of time, is existential de-conceptualization of reality that is something of a reformatting of the world.

Affinity: field of force, being under pressure of its own structures, constitutive phenomenon of the ego, is given, and, at the same time, being forced to be given different, being the same.

Affinity: always such a way of existing order, not only from today’s point of view (and exactly from today’s point of view) somewhat ridiculous, cannot in the end seem any different than as a decent arrangement of things – interpretation of the world (…) coming about to its completion through the picking of trivial contents and strange forms.

Distant Relatives: coexistence – its hybrid feature is the case of being of the existentially rehabilitated. The artificialities of this fundamental remake are existential self-awareness and existential performative spontaneousness.

The artists presenting themselves at this exhibit project are working with materials and concepts situated on the verge of artistic practice. Their favorite topic is emptied being and destructed thought contents. Their creations offer such final visual matters, in which traditional complex value structures are very hard to be identified, and meaning constituents of their works must be decoded by the viewer from residually present visual traces that – at the point of their illumination or, more precisely, at the point of seemingly reaching their punchline – configure new, visually subversive contents.

How does the artist imagine the world? As a distant affinity. As a thing worthy of admiration. Firstly, detecting a light breeze of ontic essences, then a raw simplicity of emotions entering their field of vision, finally crowned with an image sequence that is inexpressible point in time.

Parallel focal point of distance is the trust in a real mundane world as a hope represented by faith in its meaningfulness without useless gestures and proclamations. Hope, accompanied by deep silence and trust in the natural order of things, whose time is not necessary to elaborate on too much.

Updated: 31. 07. 2023