Jan Freiberg attended the photography studio headed by Pavel Baňka at the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, and subsequently studied the history of design and new media at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. His professional activity takes place at the interface of curatorial and artistic activities, with the individual outputs often intersecting. Jan Freiberg is behind the operations of several regional galleries and is a promoter and organiser of cultural activities.
He stopped working as a freelance photographer in 2007. He says that the turning point came during the preparation of the exhibition Photography of the 1970s in Czechoslovakia, when he and the curator Pavel Vančát toured many of the living artists represented in the exhibition. In an interview with Jiří Ptáček, he confides that it was their disillusionment and unfulfilled goals related to art photography that discouraged him “from embarking seriously and fully upon such a bold and serious undertaking – to be an artist” (Jan Freiberg, Bez spirituality jsme živi jen napůl, in: http://jiriptacek.blogspot.com/2018/10/jan-freiberg-bez-spirituality-jsme-zivi.html, accessed 12 May 2021). However, he did not abandon photography completely and linked it, for example, with his project on orcharding (SAD 2011), tracing the similarity between photography and the motif of the old orchard: the connotations of the romantic notion of orcharding as a kind of paradise and the similarly sentimental notion of the old photograph now merged into one. Freiberg, together with Blanka Szwed, encouraged the collection of photos of old orchards, bringing together the stories of individual people connected by a particular community. In various places around the Czech Republic (e.g. in Uničov, Ostrava and Volyn) they addressed these communities and presented their local solidarity with a certain amount of sentimentality. This project revealed Freiberg’s work to reside at the intersection of free artistic creation and curatorial thinking in historical, social, and local contexts, which the author brought together in the medium of photography.
Freiberg worked for many years as a curator and photographer at the Klatovy / Klenová Gallery, but had to leave in 2010. While looking for a new gallery, he came across an old funeral hall from the late 1980s, located in the Malsička cemetery in Volyn. In this unconventional space, he built the Na shledanou Gallery, which is part of the Municipal Museum in Volyn. The gallery quickly acquired a name for itself in the sphere of contemporary art. In the first three years of the gallery’s operations, its programme focused more on more classical media – i.e. mainly painting – and its motto was “to make contemporary art accessible so that it can be perceived as part of public life and public space in a small town” (TZ galerie Na shledanou, in: http://galerienashledanou.blogspot.com/2010/08/tiskovka-josef-bolf-uz-te-neuvidim.html, accessed 10 May 2021).
Artists enjoyed residencies at the gallery, during which they transformed the interior space and painted the walls. The exhibitors included Josef Bolf, Ondřej Maleček, Lenka Vítková, Blanka Jakubíčková and Vendula Chalánková. When the gallery had established itself in the eyes of local residents, the programme began to move towards more conceptual and performative projects, such as Andrej Boleslavský’s virtual reality presentation entitled Beztíže / Weightlessness (2019), or an experiment in which artists enter and develop parts of other artists’ works. In 2018, for example, Patrik Pelikán created the monumental relief Spád / Momentum, which intervenes in a building by the architect Norbert Schmidt from 2014, which in turn was give a vault in 2017 by the sculptor Jiří Příhoda.
Most of the exhibitions were thematically linked to the location of the gallery – a place of contemplation, quiet memories and reminders of the transience of life. Although this was not explicitly required of the artists, since their work was created for a specific space with a very specific and strong atmosphere, they usually engaged with the theme of death or the cemetery itself in some way. Thus, for his exhibition Representation of Time to the End of the Piece (2013), Dan Vlček collected old gramophone records from antique shops, which had found their way there from various estates, and turned them into an obelisk as a memorial and homage to their dead owners. In addition to Jan Freiberg, other curators have also presented at the gallery – for example, Martin Vaněk, who prepared Peter Demek’s exhibition entitled Lucerny smrti / Lanterns of Death (3 November 2018 – 2 November 2019).
The gallery also prepared an accompanying programme, mainly featuring lectures on funerary sculpture and architecture, guided tours connected with walks through the local cemetery, and the openings of individual exhibitions, where visitors could indulge in black coffee and a Czech cake known as a “little coffin” topped with whipped cream. In addition, Jan Freiberg published Smuteční noviny / Mourning Newspaper approximately once a year, which he dedicated to “the relationship between death, life and art” (Galerie Na shledanou, in: http://galerienashledanou.blogspot.com/, accessed 10 May 2021). Its content was extensive, ranging from interviews, via informed articles related to funereal themes in art or even in architecture (see Jan Šépka’s article Kde je ukryta síla sakrálního prostoru? / Where is the power of the sacred hidden?), to texts on individual exhibition projects that had taken place since the last issue of the magazine. Even though Galerie Na shledanou stands outside the mainstream, its operations have shown that it occupies an important place on the Czech art scene. In an interview with Jiří Ptáček, Jan Freiberg says: “In a place where something ends, there is a good chance for a new beginning. And I attribute such transformative power to good art – it can change our attitudes.” (See note 1, http://jiriptacek.blogspot.com/2018/10/jan-freiberg-bez-spirituality-jsme-zivi.html, accessed 12 May 2021.) The Na shledanou Gallery operated until 2019, when Jan Freiberg became the director of the František Drtikol Gallery in Příbram. However it did not close down completely, and it is not out of the question that it will reopen at some point in the future. The Virtual Reality project, which was started here in 2015, is still being developed by Freiberg, for example with the sculptor, architect and digital designer Vojtěch Rada. But virtual reality as a transfer of the living world into the world of computers, a prospect that is getting closer and closer, is something that concerns Freiberg. The project has several layers, one of which is a kind of “design sculpture”, a virtual reality game room in contemporary art, in which the projects of individual artists are hidden within virtual reality.
In the František Drtikol Gallery in Příbram, for example, viewers will be able to become part of a painting by Josef Bolf and other artists. Freiberg is thus creating a completely new, progressive format within the Czech gallery environment, in an attempt to make the art scene accessible to younger viewers. He is therefore developing virtual reality, while at the same time awakening a greater interest in public space and the cultural revival of the city. Finally, the František Drtikol Gallery in Příbram also offers Freiberg the opportunity to continue to focus on the medium of photography. In the exhibition Ferdinand Bučina: Summer Retrospective (2020), Freiberg continues his earlier work within the context of the Fotograf Festival, when in 2016 he put together a selection from the archive of the photographer Ferdinand Bučina. Bučina had taken photos of the White Carpathians at the end of the last century, with the relationship between man and nature being his main theme, and his seminal works included a photographic epic featuring the people of Javorník. Freiberg has published Bučina’s archive in the gallery in Příbram and published a comprehensive catalogue.
Freiberg was also at the birth of the Oživme si Strakonice / Let’s Revive Strakonice movement (2012–2016), which consisted of about eight to ten people: activists, architects, theoreticians and art historians. The aim of the movement was to transform the collective memory of the local inhabitants of Strakonice and to show not only them, but also the city councillors, what is not quite working in the city. Thematically, the project drew mainly on the town’s past, especially on its important industrial status. It highlighted the dilapidated machine industry, including the famous company Čezeta and its legendary motorbike nicknamed the pig, as well, of course, as the local textile factory Fezko. It organised architectural workshops drawing on this past glory and highlighting the dilapidated buildings, and posed the question of how to ideally dispose of these buildings in the future.
The Oživte si barák / Revive Your Building project also possessed a similarly activist spirit, with artists and curators trying to point out problematic places in Prague that had fallen into disrepair due to the impact of development projects. Freiberg did something similar in 2012 with the old spa building U Slupi at Albertov. He worked not only with the history of the place, but also with its wider surroundings, and made a short film (edited by Roman Štětina) comprising interviews about Albertov. People described how they perceived the place in the past versus how they perceive it now, and Freiberg continued the interviews to the spa, onto which he projected his video. He further enlivened the opening with a happening, where he borrowed a sauna, brought it to Albertov on his bicycle and made it available to passers-by.
There is an almost activist feel to Freiberg’s work. His photographic projects were usually linked to social and ecological themes and drew attention to the fact that, though, as a species, we are not alone in the world, we are the only ones responsible for ecological impacts and that we should take this fact seriously. He therefore sees art as a possible way of passing on certain ideas and principles of living. In an interview with Jiří Ptáček, he says: “[…] it would seem to me wilfully blind for an artist to devote themselves merely to themes that take into account the interests of a single species.” And it is his thoughts on past and future that form one of the important points of intersection connecting up his artistic, curatorial, and civic-activist activities.
