ABOUT FOTOGRAF FESTIVAL: Make Voices Be Heard

#2 min Naomi Smolík, Adam Vačkář

3. 10. 2024

#47 Make Voices Be HeardEditorialProfile

Contemporary art has frequently explored the legacy and impact of colonialism as a central theme for several years now. While countries from North and South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia tend to be represented in exhibitions and conferences on the subject, representatives from countries under the power influence of the former Soviet Union are usually absent. And yet these countries also have their own experience of colonialism, whether as colonisers or as cultures that were colonised.

#47 Make Voices Be HeardEditorialProfileHistoryEssaySurvey

Naomi Smolík

NOEMI SMOLIK grew up in Prague. She studied art history, history and philosophy in Cologne and New York. She was teaching at the Universities of Fine Arts in Hamburg, Dresden and on the Universities in Cologne, Münster and Bonn. Her texts are published in FAZ/Frankfurt, frieze/ London, artforum/New York, e-flux/New York and Kunstforum/Cologne as well as in exhibition catalogues. 2020 she received the ADKV-Art Cologne Preis for art critic. She is a co-founder of the Hope Recycling Station, a platform dealing with questions of colonialism, decolonialism and racism in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Her new bookMalewitschs Ohrfeige dem modernen Geschmack, an attempt to decolonize the writing of art history, will be published in September by Matthes & Seitz/Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin and Prague.

Adam Vačkář

ADAM VAČKÁŘ’s work is conceptually driven and spans the disciplinary boundaries of visual art, biology, and postcolonial thought in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He graduated  from the Academy of Arts in Paris. His work has been exhibited in SMAK, Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Art Basel, and other venues. He is the co-founder of the Hope Recycling Station platform. In his PhD thesis and current projects, he explores parallels between colonial patterns in both social and biological realms.

EDITORIAL

#2 min Markéta Kinterová, Světlana Malinová

EDITORIAL

#47 Make Voices Be HeardIntro

Its motivation is to give space to voices that primarily come from the eastern part of the old continent, which, in our experience, tend to go unheard. This is true on many levels, whether within the framework of the European or global artistic practice or doubtlessly also in social scientific debates on the topic of decolonisation, which are so crucial for understanding not only the past but also the ramifications we continue to experience to date.

Antonín Dufek (1943-2023)

#1 min Hana Buddeus, Petra Trnková

Antonín Dufek (1943-2023)

#46 tourismObituary

In May 2023, when we were putting together the laudation for the award of the Art History Society Prize to Antonín Dufek, we flipped through photographs that capture important moments in his life. In one of these photographs, Tomáš Fassati captured a young man posing in an office at the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Dufek joined the MG in 1968 and over more than four decades built up a collection of photography that has become a real sensation. Perhaps an even more important contribution of his many years of work was the systematisation of the history of Czech photography.