The Ostrava scene is a concept that continues to survive as a reference to the great surge in cultural life in Ostrava in the late 1980s and continued intensively throughout the 1990s. Despite the rapturous rise and reception of artists from Ostrava in the rest of the country, they have not been very strongly embraced domestically. Following numerous important activities by Ostrava artists like Jiří Surůvka, Petr Lysáček and Daniel Balabán and their eventual entry into the academic sphere, a second generation of Ostrava artists began to emerge in the 1990s, and like their predecessors and teachers they immediately began to insert themselves in the wider context of contemporary Czech art under the banner of the Ostrava scene. Artists from the second generation of the Ostrava scene include the group Kamera skura, Record, and painters Denisa Fialová, Katarína Szanyiová and Aleš Hudeček.
Members of the group Kamera skura, founded in 1996, include Martin Adamec (*1972), Jiří Maška (*1972), Martin Červenák (*1973) and René Rohan (*1973), all graduates of Lysáček’s intermedia studio in what was then still the Department of Art at the Pedagogical Faculty of the University of Ostrava. The character of their work derives from the Ostrava’s prime features; their themes are irony, subversion and social criticism rising out of the contradictory milieu of Ostrava’s industrial death throes. The high point of the external ennoblement of the Ostrava scene was their participation, following Jiří Surůvka in 2001, in the Venice Biennale in 2003, where they presented their project Superstar (2003), a three-metre sculpture of Jesus Christ dressed in athletic attire and training on gymnastic rings in a crucified pose.
A basic feature of Kamera skura’s work is their ironic self-mythologising and self-projection into well-known cliché poses. They also created the well-known performance Visualisation of the Group’s Collective Spirit (Vizualizace společného ducha skupiny), in which all the members were wrapped up in an electrical-condensing straightjacket, in an effort to project an image of a collective ‘group head’. A characteristic all the group’s members share is their fascination with performance and collective self-irony, though as individual artists they draw on slightly different principles. René Rohan focuses on the reflection of personal experiences from Ostrava, a city full of social inequalities; Martin Adamec takes an ironic approach to art itself; a more conceptual approach is observed in the objects and installations of Martin Červenák and the paintings of Jiří Maška.
References: 3. Bienále mladého umění (The Biennial of Young Art, exhibition catalogue), Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 1999.
