Healing 2.0

Tereza Jindrová is part of the organizational and curatorial team of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society. Together with curator Eva Riebová, she is in charge of the dramaturgy of the exhibition programme at the MeetFactory and, together with Veronka Čechová, she also runs the Entrance Gallery of contemporary art. In addition to her curating activities, she has also been involved in art critique for a long time.

In 2020, Tereza Jindrová joined the MeetFactory as Chief Curator and, together with her colleague Eva Riebová, she is responsible for the gallery’s exhibition programme. Their curatorial concept, entitled Other Knowledge, focuses on ways of seeing and knowing the world, relying on intuitive, imaginative or irrational practices, and through them the curators seek to explore related approaches in contemporary art. This thematic framework is close to Tereza Jindrová's long-term focus and also appears in her exhibition Healing 2.0 (2019), which she realized at the MeetFactory Gallery while still an external curator.

The exhibition Healing 2.0 focuses on the themes of health, healing and therapy and explores how contemporary artists work with these issues. It focuses in particular on projects that situate these themes in a broader social and political context. Healthy lifestyles, wellness and care for physical and mental fitness are now global trends and an integral part of modern life. However, in her concept, Tereza Jindrová emphasises the need to look at this phenomenon critically and to perceive its internal contradictions. Although health can be defined in different ways, it usually determines certain norms that a person has to meet or fulfil. The desire to be fit and to constantly improve oneself physically and mentally thus represents both positive values, as well as another tool of normalisation.

The second level that Jindrová works with here touches on the question of medicine and technology. Jindrová was particularly interested in the tension created by the clash of progress and modern development with traditional healing, magic and ritual. Their interrelationship reveals that although these approaches appear as opposites, they are in fact largely intertwined. Their clashes and paradoxical connections are thematized throughout the exhibition - through specific works, but also through the architecture of the exhibition itself. Its author, Jakub Jansa, focused in his conception on structuring the space on the principle of connecting and overlapping several realities. On the one hand, his realisation was meant to resemble the sterility and coldness of a hospital or a laboratory, but on the other hand, chaos, intuition or emotionality overflows into it.

Healing 2.0 is the result of long-term curatorial research, which ultimately had several outcomes. The Prague exhibition was preceded by a show in Berlin called Healing (2018), which had a similar focus and selection of artists. This first exhibition was organised by the Jindřich Chalupecký Society and presented mainly those artists from the Czech scene who participated in the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. Their line-up was complemented by a shortlist of foreign artists. In addition to the exhibitions themselves, Tereza Jindrová also prepared a series of art videos entitled Commanded Release, which dealt with the topic of collective therapy and exercise from the perspective of contemporary art.