Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2023: The Principle of Connection

The Jindřich Chalupecký Award has repeatedly changed its rules: first, those regarding the selection of winners, and now also the number of laureates as well as the age restrictions, both of which will be adopted for next year. And indeed, similar changes in the rules and guidelines of various art competitions have become a global phenomenon – questions about the relationship of the finalists to the laureates or age restrictions have become hot topics for the Oskár Čepan Award of Slovakia as well as the British Turner Prize, and the World Press Photo has also recently undergone significant changes with the cancellation of the categories of Sports, Portraits and Nature, instead opting to select regional winners from individual continents. The Jindřich Chalupecký Society board is, in this sense, following world trends, although a certain element of competition remains in the world (in contrast to Czechia), albeit under different conditions. But this new approach in no way dissuades artists who have taken or wish to take part in the competition. This year, the committee selected five laureates from about 90 applications, and there are even more applicants for the coming year due to the lifting of age restrictions.

This is also one of the reasons why the Jindřich Chalupecký Society, with its history, focus, and attempts at presenting contemporary visual art, remains a very important actor on the Czech art scene. And certain principles from the past remain: one of the main outcomes of this year’s JChA is an exhibition of contemporary art boasting a generous budget, featuring a foreign guest as well as an accompanying program and catalog full of color photographs of the art works, made available for free as part of the exhibition. Due to the rule change, this exhibition is also no longer a competitive showcase but rather a presentation of contemporary art featuring the works of selected artists. These were, however, not selected by the curator of Plato gallery but by a prestigious jury which this year included Ivet Ćurlin (Kunsthalle Wien), Anna Daučíková (a visual artist of Slovakian background), Charles Esche (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Fatoş Üstek (Frieze Sculpture, London), and Jan Zálešák (Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology).

The principle of non-competition, cooperation, and collective work that the JChA has instituted also transfers to the laureates’ exhibition. Within the vast spaces of the former Bauhaus store, the individual works overlap, interacting with each other more easily than if they had been installed under the conditions of a competitive environment in which some would be winners and others not. Despite this, Petra Janda’s central piece slightly dominates the space, its “roots” extending throughout the exhibition. The artist created it by weaving straw, and it is in this sense demonstrative of the principles she uses in her work: she accompanies her pieces with performances and includes her family, artists, and friends in their production (i.e., their creation and accompanying program). But a second glance shows that other pieces also successfully grab the viewers’ attention, extending and interacting with each other (at times it seems as if they were even reacting to each other), and that the exhibition leaves much to the perspective of the audience, to their point of view and their place in the exhibition space.

The work of Lenka Glisníková, for example, deals with the topic of work. Her exhibited object only hints at the fact that the author originally worked with photography, and here she presents an organic whole connected by installation pipes, composed of various components and UV prints on plexiglass. Kryštof Brůha then explores the artistic and scientific idioms of various phenomena constituting our world, his images documenting the change of average temperature on Earth between 2013–2023. In the presented installation, he works with a liquid that is able to decompose the light spectrum in the liquid medium, and also produces pendants made of various ores. Gabriela Těthalová presents abstract paintings with organic features such as bird feathers, stylized hands, and vegetal shapes. Her paintings are, however, not mounted on walls but instead composed into clusters placed at various places around the exhibition.

I must note that without catalogs and flyers (Těthalová’s work being the exception here), the presented themes would at first sight be almost illegible. The exhibition does work at a visual level, but to decode its motifs, one must consult the accompanying texts. This is also true of the “last” installation by the StonyTellers group. In their case, we read about cooperation, collective engagement, mutual support, and an interest in the functioning of contemporary capitalist society. The collective’s members grow their own herbs and vegetables and create installations which include the consumption of drinks and meals from vessels of their own making. This is also the case in Plato gallery, where their installation overlaps with both the exhibition space and the café in which patrons are invited to sit at tables lighted by their lamps and drink tea served in mugs and kettles they made.

“Everything” in the exhibition ultimately seems as if “it” were made to achieve the utmost level of correctness. It seems as if it was very carefully considered that the final selection ought to include women, that nobody should feel they were allotted worse spatial conditions than others, and that the artists and their installations ought to receive proper care and attention. It seems as if the curators and jury attempted to select those laureates who address themes that are currently trending globally. Even the neo-romanticism employing fantastical landscapes peopled with elves, dragons, and other beings, which young artists often use as a means for self-expression and a form of commentary on the contemporary world, seems to have been pushed out by themes and motifs more relevant from a global standpoint.

If I were to compare the exhibition of the JChA laureates with other exhibitions of contemporary young art, such as the graduate exhibitions of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague or the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology, the JChA is more intensely focused on themes having to do with climate change, collective affect, the value of human work, ecology, and a return to nature and natural materials. But judging by the commentary included in the accompanying texts, we do not find works that would deal with “banal” motifs documenting everyday activities, i.e., works which would emphasize colors, shapes, or the use of specific technologies. This begs the question about the criteria on which the finalists were selected – to what degree was it a question of spontaneous decision based on the selection of artistically notable projects, and to what degree was it based on premeditated calculation, the subsequent discussions with the artists, and the push to thematize the required motifs?

Personally, I still find it pleasing that the featured works illustrate the spectrum of what contemporary art can offer in terms of material, and the fact that they seem to dissolve the boundaries between design and art, as well as the boundaries between various art fields. I believe that most of the exhibited pieces would be received very well at any eminent European exhibition of contemporary art. But we still must ask whether many people visit such exhibitions not in search of an artistic experience but rather in quest of the brand that such exhibitions embody. Is the Jindřich Chalupecký Award just such a brand (or not) in the local context? At least judging by the interest the Award generates among Czech artists, we can say that the JChA is still a prestigious award, also because it offers the chance to meet an international jury and opens paths to acquiring new options and contacts. But the Chalupecký brand does not work well for the audience: among the Czech expert public, discussions about the prize and its laureates do not garner as much attention as, say, the curation of the next documenta or the question of who will become director of the Galerie Rudolfinum. If one thing about Chalupecký has indeed resonated in the wider discussion, it was the aforementioned change to its rules. But that discussion has also dimmed, and now almost no one is discussing the exhibition in the context of laureate selection or the importance of their work. I believe that cancelling the aspect of a single winner has made the Jindřich Chalupecký Award marginal from the perspective of the wider audience and has made it very much like other exhibitions of young Czech art, with the exception that the more educated segments of the public know about it.

If someone were to ask me whether it is worth visiting Plato gallery, I would certainly say yes. But I would send them primarily to see the exceptional exhibition Uprchlá, našel skrýš, stále uniká, installed in the neighboring former slaughterhouse, to which the JChA showcase can serve as a pleasant bonus. But we must acknowledge that our society keeps evolving and that the Jindřich Chalupecký Society continues to evolve with it. And that means that the most recent changes are certainly not the last.

Kryštof Brůha, Lenka Glisníková, Petra Janda, Gabriela Těthalová, StonyTellers collective / Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2023 / The Jindřich Chalupecký Society curatorial collective (Veronika Čechová, Barbora Ciprová, Tereza Jindrová, Karina Kottová) and Jakub Adamec / Plato Ostrava – Bauhaus / 1 November 2023 – 25 February 2024