Ripple effect

Karina Kottová has been the director of Jindřich Chalupecký Society since 2015. From the beginning, she has been working on gradually transforming this institution in line with the existing needs of the Czech art scene and the challenges of the present time, focusing on fair working conditions in the art sector, social role of art institutions, and their ecological sustainability. Jindřich Chalupecký Society has gradually transformed to a curator collective, which partakes in the running of this institution in a conceptual, production and organizational ways, with a primary focus on supporting art work, representing Czech art in the international context, or inviting international artists, curators, or other professionals for residencies in the Czech environment, which often leads to further collaboration.

While the Society is currently developing several program lines, the one best known is the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for visual artists up to the age of 35. During the past several years, this award has gone through an intensive reflection and gradual transformation to a form that primarily supports the origin of new art and the work of artists in the given age category. The competitive aspect has gradually been shifted aside, and has been replaced with the formation of the task and function of this institution in the context of the existing state of Czech, as well as international art scene.

These topics are articulated in the concept of the exhibition Ripple Effect (2017), which Karina Kottová organized in cooperation with curator, Fatoş Üstek. The works exhibited were selected from the works sent to the current year of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award that did not make it to the final cut of nominated works. Ripple Effect, however, is not a display of unsuccessful candidates that would re-evaluate their quality, but an exhibition based on speculative narratives through which the curators address the dynamics of competing and introduce questions regarding the values and hierarchy in the art world. In harmony with her previous curator projects, Kottová’s approach to the given issue was not strictly rational. When studying the young Czech art scene, Kottová and Üstek, primarily used a subjective approach based on the mapping of influences and inspirations, and on observing the networks and relationships that intervene in the process of art creation and form it. The exhibition was structured similarly to the so-called ripple effect – like expanding circles on the water level. The curators chose three pieces of work by established artists from the international scene, who opened up for them and foreshadowed three directions articulated as joy, speculation and temperament. Around these, other topics, questions and discourses gradually expanded through the works of Czech artists. Three works like three impulses activating the domino effect and stream of liberal associations concerning primarily institutional and systematic topics in the art sector. Categorization, judging and evaluation reflect specific politics of the art world, and the objective of the exhibition Ripple Effect was to examine how artists see themselves and orientate in this system.

Ripple Effect presents an exhibition format, which experiments with its structure, while it lets the dialogues and confrontations among the art pieces and the artists play on several levels. The curators organize (and to a certain extent manipulate) the wide spectrum of topics, approaches and narratives to unexpected constellations that reveal new connections, and primarily institutional mechanisms on the local, as well as international scenes.