http://www.ogv.cz/how_forests_exhib

curators: Lenka Dolanová, Michal Kindernay

The exhibition focuses on the depiction of forest in European art today. It is inspired by current scientific approaches to plants that accentuate „passionate immersion“ into surrounding non-human world, enlarge the sphere of representation, cultivate the idea of forest as an interconnected and thinking organism. In their pursuit to find a new approach to the realm of plants, forms of cooperation among various fields and species emerge. The title of the exhibition comes from the book How Forests Think by anthropologist Eduardo Kahn, in which he asks what does it mean to be human in such an expanded world.

Artworks can help nourishing the „art of attention“ necessary for changing approach to other living organisms. Art, often in close connection with science, can enlarge our sensitivity towards non-human objects and disrupt our ideas about what is normal and desirable concerning our treatment of plants. It teaches us to think about forests or together with them. The selection of works emphasizes the diversity of possible approaches, but at the same time makes up a unit, a report about current audiovisual thinking about forests (included in the exhibition are sound reportage, graphic art, sound and video installation, land art, painting, drawing, illustration, poetry). Forests play a complex role in European culture and imagination. The exhibition explores the concept of forest as a recourse, a place foreign and unknown, forest as an immeasurable space as well as clearly confined and neatly organized area, where various and often contradictory interests mingle and interfere. Vysočina is the region with a rich tradition of landscape painting and with artists still living in the middle of the „wilderness“. Some of the local artists will be presented together with authors from elsewhere in the Czech Republic and also from Finland, Latvia, Romania, Poland and Great Britain.  

The accompanying programs will include films (by filmer Hana Nováková, among others), walk through Železné hory with artist and scientists, lecture about forest representation in the artworks from Vysočina. A thematic issue by O-kraj newspaper (Nr. 6) will be published, with interviews with artists, reportages, theoretical texts, poetry.

Lenka Dolanová

Regional Gallery of Vysočina in Jihlava - Komenského 10