On the Czech art scene Jan Zálešák is primarily known as a curator and theoretician lecturing at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. His professional background, however, is not in the study of art history or theory, but in pedagogical education, which he had first in Hradec Králové, following which he continued in completing his doctorate at the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University from where he graduated in 2007 with his diploma work called Rámce interpretace (Framework of Interpretation) (with the subheading For the Interpretation of Paintings in Professional Discourses and in Fine Art Education). In his work he focuses on comparing various approaches to the interpretation of paintings in professional discourse and in fine art education, while he observes the shift of the focus from art history to visual studies as the main point of reference of progressive fine art education.
His interest in education and art mediation has always been closely tied to the contemporary art scene, which he reflected in numerous artistically-critical texts after coming to Brno in 2003. Zálešák’s relationship to contemporary art to a great degree projects also into his professional theoretical practice. In 2007, he organized together with Radek Horáček a colloquium devoted to gallery education and fine art education, which was accompanied by an anthology of lectured texts (Aktuální otázky zprostředkování umění (Current Questions in Art Mediation)). One year later, both authors followed up with a symposium, for which they set the goal to map again the methods of fine art education (anthology Veřejnost a kouzlo vizuality (The Public and the Magic of Visualisation)), this time with a reference to art works encompassing direct communication with the viewer or the viewer’s active participation.
From 2009 to 2013, Zálešák worked as an external teacher at the Masaryk University in Brno where he lectured, among other subjects, about the introduction to visual studies at the Institute of Music Science at the Faculty of Philosophy. In 2011 he started working as an asistent profesor at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology, where he is currently the head of the Department of Art Theory and History.
Another project related to education, this time university education, was the project Školy umění (Art Schools), which was initiated in 2012 by the Faculty of Art and Design, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem and which enjoyed the cooperation of five Czech art schools (independent academies and art faculties). Five individual curator programs were part of the final exhibition Hi5 in the Brno House of Arts (DUMB). One of these, called s-flux, was prepared by Zálešák in cooperation with Šárka Svobodová. They gradually invited all 15 studios from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno to the gallery DUMB in the House of the Lord of Kunštát and asked them to prepare their own program reflecting the interest and direction of the students. The result was a dynamic presentation of 15 one-day long exhibitions presenting the relationships within the school institutions, but also situations taking the methods of art education outside of the “secure” school environment.
During the years 2008-2010 Zálešák worked as curator for Galerie mladých in Brno, where he primarily focused on independent exhibitions of beginning artists. He also organized here a group exhibition entitled Re-romantic (2009), in which he focused on examining the legacy and current appearance of Romanticism in Czech art. Later he also cooperated as a freelance curator with the Fait Gallery, with the House of Arts in Brno, with Gallery Kabinet T in Zlín, or with Václav Špála Gallery and FUTURA in Prague.
Zálešák’s most significant curator projects included primarily the exhibitions Vzpomínky na budoucnost II (Recolections of the Future II) (House of Arts of the City of Brno, 2013/2014) and Apocalypse me (Emil Filla in Ústí nad Labem, 2016). The first exhibition mentioned was devoted to works of art that originated as a result of research in the area of historical memories or archive. It was an attempt to map, in the Czech context, the tendency which in 2004 Hal Foster called the “Archive Impulse”. In this exhibition, however, Zálešák did not try to observe only how artists examine the legacy of modernism, but through this “(n)ostalgic” perspective he tried to critically reflect our not very satisfactory present. A follow up to this was the exhibition Apocalypse me, in which Zálešák introduced an international group of artists. Although the art works exhibited worked with a language formally different from the preceding exhibition, the declared interest in the current situation remained, specifically the consequences of global hegemony of late capitalism. The topic of an apocalypse in the title refers to the long-term crisis in which society finds itself under the weight of such system and it sometimes gives the impression that it will collapse at any moment.
In addition to curator work, Zálešák also pursues critical and theoretical writing. He has been publishing in periodicals including Ateliér, Artalk, Art & Antiques or Fotograf. In 2010 his study treating critical curatorship and the issue of artistic research was published in Sešit pro umění, teorii a příbuzné zóny (Notebook for Art, Theory and Relative Zones). Here he partially followed up on the conference in Kassel, which took place in March 2010 and the topic of which was the question of how much current curator strategies tie in with the tradition of institutional critique and how much they are developing it. In his text, Zálešák observed some acts of “curator activism” and he attributed the precarious conditions of cultural workers as their “mycelium”.
In 2011, under the header of the Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts, where he also shortly worked in 2008, he had a fundamental publication Umění spolupráce (The Art of Cooperation) published; it was devoted to the area of participative art and the cooperation of artists in pairs or artistic groups. In this book, which in its introduction recapitulates the development of participative art and its theoretical reflexion, Zálešák focuses primarily on Czech art in the past 25 years, in which he maps not only collective art work and projects founded on the cooperation with the public or gallery visitors, but also on overlaps of the “art of cooperation” in the direction of social and political involvement.
