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Three takes on memory

Summer residency program at Castle Třebešice inspires familiar reminiscences
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
October 18th, 2006 issue

Romanian photographer Iosif Kiraly splices together scenes of everyday life from the castle environs to achieve interesting panoramic effects.

"Let's all take a trip down memory lane — in cinematic stereo," would be a better name for "Memoria," the current group exhibition at Futura, which is actually three intermingled solo exhibitions by artists Kenseth Armstead, Stefania Galegati and Iosif Kiraly.

These three artists were invited to the Futura Artists' Residency Program at Castle Třebešice over the summer, with "Memory as a mirror of future things" as the theme of the residency. After living side by side for months, they've produced work that has a unity uncommon in most group shows.

Třebešice was a long-desolate Baroque castle that saw particular neglect after its confiscation by the communists after World War II. Over the past few years, however, the building and surrounding lands have been rebuilt to host artists in residence as well as ambitious seasonal exhibitions of international and Czech artists. The projects developed there by Armstead, Galegati and Kiraly reflect both the memories enveloped within the castle and the artists' own personal histories and memories — and they tap into ours as well.

Memoria

at Futura
Ends Nov. 12. Holečkova 49, Prague 5–
Smíchov. Open Wed.–Sun. noon–7 p.m.

Armstead, a New Yorker, has nine videos showing throughout Futura's labyrinthine gallery rooms. His cycle of video works titled "Invisible Cities" is inspired by Italo Calvino's book of the same name, and the videos play on the idea of "returning home" to Africa, the anthropological motherland of all men.

Armstead has also brought old planks, frames and miscellaneous scraps of wood from the farm at Třebešice, and neatly stacked them in corners and over wood beams on the ceiling, creating a global village or shantytown effect.

Apples is a short video framed with wide bands of color that captures a village in Africa with an authentic street-drumming soundtrack and fast-talking street kids. "How do you like them apples? How do you like them fucking coconuts?" asks an African man in the background. Sentimental Hello is a reunion, a hug and kiss of old lovers, a black man and a white woman at a place that looks like a resort or hotel garden.

Knotting Night C is an intellectual's music video, an African music lesson with fast cuts and various backdrops including speeches, discos and artists' parties. At one house party, a young black guy tells a group of his white friends, "We all came from Africa in the beginning ... then some became white. You're highly evolved 'cause you're white!"

Italian painter and video artist Stefania Galegati's work complements Armstead's, sans the emphasis on Africa. Instead, Galegati creates works from different locations around the globe. She has a painting titled Gang, portraying European hoodlums standing tough in front of a statute of Lenin; another, The Scientists, shows a group of Asian tourists standing inquisitively beside their bus on a desolate, open plain.

In Notes by Chance # 6, Galegati uses dual video images from her travels around the world. There are tourist sites, airport lounges, busy city sidewalks and streets from all continents, accompanied by an overall excellent soundtrack encompassing African soul, French pop (Jacques Brel) and other assorted songs, some beautiful and others kitschy. Her remarkable short film The Hole, shot in the town square of Trento, Italy, is a surrealistic suspense-action thriller that ends in a frightening blur of celebration.

Anyone can relate to Galegati's videos, because, after all, whether it is a statue in Europe or America, or a bustling corner in South America or southern Spain, there are more similarities than differences identifiable in a flash image. These momentary glimpses, combined with her exquisite soundtrack (including gems by Calexico, Charlie Byrd and Afro-samba beats), open up personal memories in each viewer, making her video work the most intimate and effective of the show.

Romanian photographer Iosif Kiraly sticks closest to his (temporary) home. In his series "Reconstructions," he shows a mosaic of images in a panoramic effect taken at Třebešice during his residency. It is an intriguing combination of day-to-day pictures of the artists and the castle and its environs, merged with cinematic images such as the artists and the exhibition's organizers eating at a long dinner table, recalling Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Unfortunately, unlike Greenaway's unforgettable film or the videos by Armstead and Galegati, Kiraly's montage lacks a soundtrack.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (18/10/2006):

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