Date: 16.01.2018
Beginning: 19:00

Politics of Truth I: Between Reality and Fiction

With the first part of the research project on documentary strategies in the contemporary video we open the polemic concerning the way in which established documentary formats relate to truth and how their form keeps changing. With reference to the seminal text of the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl called Politics of Truth. Documentarism in Art we ask how documentary practice can be a topical means of political activity and which ways current art finds to come to terms with its loss of credibility in representing reality.

The first commented series of videos to be presented at the Etc. Gallery in January 2018 will present a selection of five works by Czech and foreign artists. Each of them takes a different stance on the boundary between reality and fiction as suggested before. Some of them do not explicitly work with documentary methods, but they contain inherent polemic regarding the place and function of an image in forming political awareness, how truth can be studied today using scientific methods, or whether today’s notion of truth is not better projected by working with fiction. The underlying thematic line is comprised of different approaches to the “territory” or physical space confronted with fictional narrative, with ideological and political interests, with the need to demarcate and defend particular areas while at the same time crossing over the boundaries.

Curators: Alžběta Bačíková and Anna Remešová

Presented videos:

NIKA AUTOR – Newsreel 63 (2017)
RUTI SELA A MAAYAN AMIR – Image Blockade (2015)
MARIE LUKÁČOVÁ – ČHOS (2015/2016)
NIR EVRON – Cover Version (2010)

The commentary will be held in Czech.