Utopia on the Abyss, National gallery, veletržní palác, Prague 7, 5.9.-15.10 2012

In order to kickstart my faltering march through the institutions, I accepted an invitation to represent the Czech National Gallery within an EU cultural exchange project in Sweden, Latvia and Bulgaria. In addition to my role as guest speaker, my job was to curate an exhibition in the foyer of the National Gallery.
All of my Czech friends advised me against any sort of cooperation with this institution. Indeed, what I observed there vividly reminded me of the competing departments within the insurmountably absurd bureaucracy depicted in Kafka’s The Castle. But thanks to the unwavering engagement of Darina Alster and Mikulas Rittstein, with whom I vitalized the inhabited sculpture with an elaborate weekly program, I succeeded in developing this inhabited sculpture into another crowd magnet in spite of hostile conditions.Here is the prerelease from this show:

Utopia on the Abyss is an inhabited sculpture curated by Mark Divo.

The inhabited sculpture as a form of presentation, on the one hand refers to the salons of the 19th century,and on he other hand is form of instantistic collective art, which has been developed within the squatters movement in Zürich since the mid 1990s.The artworks exhibited are built on site,and often artists collaborate spontaneously ,through this process the authorship of the artworks become increasingly difficult to define.By placing the art pieces next to furniture from the junkyard and found objects from the street, the concept of the priceless artwork is put into question.The inhabited sculpture also defies the ruling conception of art being the product of an individual artist. With society having more and more free time at hand the artist utopia of creative individuals teaming up to explain the world could be the brige over to the abyss of consumerism we are currently falling down.

The following artists have collaborated on the inhabited sculpture:

artists:

Ingo Giezendanner (CH) Mickry Drei (CH) flx labs (CH) Raffael Perret (CH) Martin Andersson (CH)
Thomas Haemmerli (CH) Secret Gäng (CH) Michal Šiml (CZ), Petr Motyčka (CZ) Mikuláš (CZ)
Lenka Klodová (CZ) Darina Alster (CZ) Klára Kohoutová (CZ) Mark Ther (CZ) Tom Kotik (CZ)
Iveta Plná (CZ) Koko (CZ) Ateliér Libušín (CZ) Blanka & Marek Chochola (CZ) Markéta Jáchimová (CZ) Jan Boháč (CZ) Martina Nosková (CZ) Guma Guar (CZ) Stephanie Wild (UK), Sonja Vectomov (CZ/FIN) Hnědá Laguna (CZ) Alice Morey (UK) Motoracek (F) Buback (CZ) Marek and Blanka Chochola (CZ) Michael Panoch (CZ) Jana Kochánková (CZ) Yumiko Ono (JAP) Johana Střížková (CZ) Elis Unique (RUS) Antonín Kopp (CZ) Koko (CZ) Michal Panoch (CZ) Peter J. Rosman (AUS)