Vít Havránek is a leading art theoretician and curator with a significant presence on the international art scene. Since 2002 he has been director of the tranzit initiative for contemporary art and co-founder of tranzitdisplay (2007), an exhibition space. He worked at the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the National Gallery in Prague and at the Prague City Gallery. He is co-founder of the production group pas (production of activities of the present), the other members of which included the artists Tomáš Vaněk and Jiří Skála.
He has curated or co-curated many exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, e.g. Otto Piene. The Zero Experience (2002); Lanterna Magika. New technologies and Science in Czech Art in the 20th Century (2002); Július Koller. Kontakt (2004); Jiří Kovanda. I’m Not Against (2004); The Need to Document (2005); Definition of the Everyday (2005); I, an exhibition in three acts (2006), etc.
It is worth taking a close look at the exhibition action, word, movement, space, which was held at the end of 1999 and into 2000 at the Prague City Gallery (GHMP) and examined experiments in Czech and Slovak art of the 1960s, an adequate history of which was delayed by the arrival of normalisation. As the title indicates, the starting point was a collection of essays, manifestos and art programmes word, letter, action, voice (1967) compiled by Josef Hiršal and Bohumila Grögerová. Marginal artistic tendencies take centre stage that evaded the then dominant, theoretically anchored polarity of art informel and constructivism. Experiments on the borderline of art, music and literature (action art, kinetic art, experimental poetry, visionary architecture, work with space, etc.) emphasised a hybridity of form and were characterised more by the status of the art event than the material artefact and by the assumption that the viewer would be an active participant. In the introductory text to the catalogue Havránek drew attention to the fact that this was the “contemporary sensibility” of the 1990s, which set the stage for an interest in the art of the sixties. “It was an exhibition that for the generation of Czech artists reaching adulthood around 2000 summed up the hitherto non-contextualised historical precedents of their own endeavours and configured their relationship to the local tradition,” Tomáš Pospiszyl said, evaluating the project. [1]
One of the key exhibition projects of the following decade was Monument to Transformation (Prague City Gallery, 2009), the culmination of a long-running research project conducted by Vít Havránek and Zbyněk Baladrán. The exhibition used art (most often in the form of video, installations, photography, drawings, charts, tables and diagrams) to map out decades of the post-totalitarian transformational processes. The curators wanted to avoid falling into the trap of interpreting social change using the East/West opposition and so conceived of the exhibition as a view of the Czech experience from a global, post-colonial perspective. They compared the transformation of eastern Europe with similar processes in other European countries (Greece, Spain and Portugal), the countries of central and south America (Chile, Mexico and Argentina) and southeast Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia).
Atlas of Transformation, a collection of more than 200 entries illustrating transformational phenomena through an interdisciplinary prism, was published alongside the exhibition. The editors themselves viewed the Atlas as a “rhizomatic assemblage” (a reference to the “image of thought” propagated by Deleuze), that offered changing and decentralised semantic interconnections.
As a member of the tranzit.org international initiative, Havránek was co-curator of one of the three exhibition sections of Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in the Spanish cities of Cartagena and Murcia (2010/11). The collective of curators (Havránek, Zbyněk Baladrán, Dóra Hegyi, Boris Ondreička and Georg Shöllhammer) reacted to the set theme, i.e. “the region of Murcia in dialogue with northern Africa”, by defining themselves critically in relation to similarly conceived exhibition strategies and art show schemata. Aware of the pitfalls that institutional criticism practiced from theoretical positions encounters in the form of the contradiction between theory and practice, they created a space for the democratic discussion of curators and artists. They attempted to eliminate the power of curatorial practice and to arrive jointly at the formulation of exhibition conditions.
One of the activities of tranzit.cz and Havránek himself in the role of editor is the creation of the tranzit series, which is closely linked to other activities of the initiative, focuses on the region of central and eastern Europe, and generates three main outputs (the series of art publications, anthologies and catalogues, and navigation). The last named edition comprises translations and original Czech texts that offer an ideological and methodological framework applicable to the social phenomena or art practice of eastern Europe. This is derived from the series of pivotal texts of postcolonial studies that were to share in the creation of the concept behind Monument to Transformation and M8.
[1] Tomáš Pospiszyl, An Associative History of Art. Post-war art spanning generations and media (collage, intermedial and conceptual art, performance and film), tranzit.cz, Praha 2014, p. 156.
