Court rules in favour of guerilla artists

Prague, Dec 22 (CTK) - Members of Ztohoven, a Czech group of artists, did not commit a crime by putting their ID cards with altered photo portraits on display last year, a Prague district court has decided, its acting deputy chairwoman Andrea Peslova has told CTK.

The court has passed the case to the Prague 1 town hall to assess whether the twelve artists committed a misdemeanour, Peslova said.

Ztohoven faced up to two years in prison and a ban if found guilty of harming other people's rights by using the morphing method to create their ID portraits as a combination of two and putting the altered IDs on display in a Prague gallery within its Obcan K. (Citizen K., a reference to writer Franz Kafka) project.

In the project, Ztohoven wanted to show how easy it is to misuse the information on people's private data.

In early 2010, Ztohoven members applied for a new identity using IDs with portraits altered by morphing. Each of them applied for an ID on a colleague's name. Then they lived with each other's identity for six months. They used the false IDs to vote in the May 2010 general election and some even married with the false identity.

The police said Ztohoven committed a crime since they had cheated on the authorities by submitting altered photos.

The court, nevertheless, said the fact that the rest of the information the artists submitted within their application was true, which considerably softened the harm they caused to the authorities, Peslova said.

Ztohoven is known for its provocative interventions in public affairs. Provocative is the group's name alone, which can be pronounced as "z toho ven" (out of it) or "sto hoven" (hundred pieces of excrement).

Ztohoven's best known "performance" is their "smuggling" a fictitious nuclear explosion in a Czech Television programme in June 2007. Many viewers got stunned at seeing an atomic mushroom appearing above the landscape in a TV report on weather conditions in the Krkonose (Giant Mountains), east Bohemia.