Featuring the artists Šárka Zahálková and Clare Chun-yu Liu, this exhibition investigates ways in which to excavate hidden narratives embedded in the locality of the Czech Republic. Through active engagement, historical imagination and academic research, the artists reveal and create new knowledge that sheds light on the political, cultural and ecological landscape of here that is otherwise buried and unseen.
Clare Chun-yu Liu presents an art film based on her postdoctoral research at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. Her artistic research reinterprets 18th-century Czech-Habsburg chinoiserie from the perspective of the Chinese diaspora, reflecting her Taiwanese origins. The film offers intercultural historiography through historical yet imaginative ethnography of relevant historical figures, including painter Johann Adalbert Kratochwill, who decorated the Chinese Cabinet in the Sternberg Palace. Šárka Zahálková will present excerpts from her dissertation project in the form of a site-specific installation that opens a dialogue with the work of Clare Chun-yu Liu. As part of her artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, under the supervision of Dušan Zahoranský, she explored the dynamics of dialogue at various levels during its collective formation in the context of the surrounding world. Her work is based on an ecofeminist and posthumanist approach to shared dialogue space and incorporates the principles of acoustic ecology, binaural field recording, nonviolent dialogue, and critical pedagogy. Through a series of sound works, she explores how to co-create a more gentle relationship with public space.
