Page 66 - The Black Box Book

rators’ work and artistic production must adapt. In the statement “I am
what I link to” Schleiner (2003) summarizes the ontological condition of
online contextualization through networking. She compares an exhibition
in a physical space and an online exhibition, concluding that while an ex-
hibition presented in a physical space has a set opening, start and end
date, it must be visited physically. Once completed, it becomes part of
a ‘cultural archive’ through the catalogue, documentation or critical recep-
tion; the online exhibition is intended for a trans-local community outside
the physical space and (if it were technologically sustainable) could exist
within a network of related and previous exhibitions that can be viewed
in multiple browser windows simultaneously.
As noted above, in the early days of lockdown, several galleries
and museums sought to rapidly translate their physical exhibitions into
the online environment, which often manifested itself in a way that “mim-
icked and kept to the standards of the gallery spaces”. (Dekker, 2021,
p. 42) However, it was also possible to take notice of art institutions,
platforms or projects that, in a given situation, chose to avoid listening
to the demands of immediately overwhelming the web with their exhibi-
tion program or to transform their physical exhibitions into virtual space.
Gaia Tedone (2021) points out that this was a situation that concerned,
above all, institutions dedicated to digital art, whose practice for several
decades now had included the implementation of online exhibitions. Some
of them have taken the opposite approach to the closure of physical gal-
leries and decided to “go quiet for a while”. (Tedone, 2021) As an example
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of such an institution, she cites Green Cube Gallery , a nomadic online/
offline space run by artists that tests the limits and relations between
the virtual and the real, and does not associate art with its material existence in
the form of artefacts, but defines it as a set of events and states. (Green
Cube Gallery, web) Revisiting this example, Tedone (2021) observes that
certain institutions demonstrated a withdrawal into a state of hibernation
17
in the early days of lockdown before ‘re-living’ again a few months later .
The Czech environment is not characterised by a wide range of on-
line galleries or virtual art-sharing projects that would exist before 2020,
so it is difficult to compare the situation with similar platforms. Perhaps
the most significant online gallery in the local Czech environment can
be considered ScreenSaverGallery, a curatorial project that is the joint
work of internet artists Barbora Trnková, Tomáš Javůrek and curator
Marie Meixnerová. This online gallery is an experimental project, utilizing
the unused function of a screensaver to present art .
18
16 Green Cube Gallery. Retrieved from https://greencube.gallery/
17 See text in this publication: Tedone, G. 2020 Digital Odyssey: Online
or Nothing
18 More information at https://screensaver.metazoa.org/.
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The Brno House of Arts can be named here as an example of a gal-
lery of a more traditional type that is quite advanced in its approach to
the long-term mediation of digital art and the openness to the quest for
ways to make art accessible during the lockdown. Between February and
April 2020, at the very beginning of the closing of cultural institutions, an
installation of objects by the artist Tomáš Moravanský, Still Left (2020),
was exhibited in one of the buildings of the House of Arts in Galerie G99.
The installation “develops the idea of grasping the perceived world as
a virtual one and using the object to set it in the space of the gallery as
a place intended for an intellectual and contemplative walk. In doing so,
it creates a paraphrase of a game that has no outcome but only possi-
bilities.” (Artalk, 17. 6. 2020)
Due to the closing of the gallery as a result of the lockdown, only
a few visitors were able to visit the exhibition, so a video in the form of
an online installation walk-through was created. The seemingly trivial idea
of bringing the exhibition to the public in the form of a recorded video
is in fact a performative artistic act, a meditative wandering through
the gallery space, much as it was intended as a physical installation.
Another ideological lineage of Moravanský’s project is also reflected from
the pre-pandemic period into the lockdown period. A time-lapse collection
of photographs was created under the title Still Files, an artistic project
realized within the framework of an open call and with the support of
Brno’s Galerie TIC as part of the curatorial project Black Box . The series
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of photographs was captured throughout the duration of the exhibition:
“Every day after opening hours, at a time when the gallery remains
deserted, photographs were taken from security cameras as a sum-
mary of the entire day, documenting the movement and activity
of visitors. Before the gallery opened, the exhibition was restored
to its original state, with destroyed boxes replaced with new ones.
The photographs were also recorded after the galleries had closed
completely due to the spread of the virus (dark photos)”
(Artalk, 17. 6. 2020)
19 Moravanský, T. (2020). Still Files. Black Box / Černá skříňka. Retrieved
from https://cerna-skrinka.cz/prj/tomas-moravansky-2020
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