The Prague Biennale, the Czech Republic’s largest international exhibition of contemporary art, has for the third time opened its old screechy gates at the event’s traditional industrial site. The former factory hall in Karlín, with its crumbling walls, massive steel girders and cement floor, has become home to more than 200 artists from 28 countries.
A novelty of this edition of the biennale is a photography exhibition, divided into four distinct sections. The vast majority of the remaining 20 sections, prepared by independent curators, is devoted to painting.
The first impression is that the main asset of this year’s biennale is its raw space. The entrance room features an attractive selection of photographs, yet you don’t feel like sinking your teeth in the first delicacy that offers itself, but will rather want to walk around the long banquet table and see the rest of the menu.
A quick walk through the hall will not strike you with any juicy highlights. Two years ago, there was a loincloth-clad Saddam Hussein swimming in a Hirstian aquarium by David Černý; a video of Marina Abramović, an icon of performance art, covering her nakedness with a skeleton; and a silver Porsche 911 with a pencil sticking our of its tyre by the Reality artist group. This time, the only obvious eye-catchers are a group of Mexicans spray-painting the walls with the help of stencils and a video of a naked girl on a beach twirling a hula-hoop made of barbed wire around her waist.
The fourth staging of Prague Biennale (the first was held at the National Gallery) is different from the previous ones already in its basic focus. While photography has been added to the portfolio next to painting, other genres have been largely eliminated, including conceptual and activist artists, traditionally the event’s most visible highlights. The currently very strong Czech conceptual movement is at least represented in one section, compiled by curator Jiří Kovanda.
This new concentration on painting and on primarily young artists may be motivated by an effort of the main organisers – Giancarlo Politi, the Italian publisher of Flash Art, and Helena Kontová, the magazine’s Czech-born editor and curator – to distinguish Prague Biennale from other, usually better-established European biennales.
The Polish section features artists including Basia Bańda and her naive paintings of naked people with real hair sewn onto the canvas. A few meters away you’ll find nostalgic and beautifully lit scenes in rundown Mumbai interiors by the Italian couple Eva and Franco Mattes. Equally original is a triptych by China’s Li Chao featuring a railway running through a gorgeous green landscape. The three idylls turn into a thriller when the viewer spots a child lying on the tracks.
Many Czech artists are represented too. Vladimír Skrepl’s impasto with unusually toned-down colours shows a woman with a penis. The Czech section includes the most recent paintings by Josef Bolt, Jan Merta and Veronika Holcová, while conceptualists are represented by Eva Koťáková and Dominik Lang.
A traditional weakness of Prague Biennale is an outdated and not very informative catalogue with poor quality reproductions. A rather chaotic and often fragmentary arrangement of individual sections within the hall impairs orientation. Sooner or later, the visitor will lose track and start moving freely between individual works that have simply caught his or her eye.
Prague Biennale
14 May – 26 July
Karlín Hall Thámova 8,
Prague 8
open daily
11am – 7pm
www.praguebiennale.org
