13 July – 18 August
Amina Abbas-Nazari, Binelde Hyrcan, Łukasz Jastrubczak, Kirill Litviak, Dietrich Meyer, Jiří Skála and Eva Urbanová
Organised Lítost Gallery
https://litost.gallery
SVIT Gallery
Blanická 845/9,
120 00 Prague
Czech Republic
There is a strange moment in a dense post-industrial city during the summer months. While residents fantasize about an escape to have some time-off, visitors think that they are receiving an imaginary leisure. Happy End reflects on this by bringing together a group of international and local artists to reproduce this summer state of collision and symbiosis in the gallery.
The artworks on display highlight the tacit structures and modes that build on this tense atmosphere. In Łukasz Jastrubczak’s work Sleeping Cowboy (2011) the viewer is confronted with the material toll taken by the process of travel, while in Dietrich Meyer’s sculpture Are We the Masters of Our Environment, or is it the Other Way Around? (2018) the relationship between static and live matter exposes the link between fabricated and grown entities. Amina Abbas-Nazari’s film Complex Cindarellas (2018) challenges the male-dominated environment of the design world with objects created to be utilised by, empower and emancipate women. Finally, in Jiří Skála’s 7-piece photographic series, Genres of Everydayness (2017), we are confronted with the bond between labour and ‘free- time’ itself.
Happy End was conceived as a cooperation between SVIT and lítost galleries. The exhibition will conclude with backwards – an evening of experimental music, choreography and film on 18 August 2018 from 6 pm. backwards will feature Bienelde Hyrcan’s movie Cambeck (2011), Eva Urbanová’s new choreography piece and Kirill Litviak’s new experimental sound piece.
Amina Abbas-Nazari is an independent British artist and Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, London, within the Design Products department. She graduated from the RCA with an MA in Design Interactions. She is interested in exploring where fiction can become reality and aims to disperse metanarratives to give way for a more diverse range of ideologies. She creates designed interactions, speculative systems and sonic fictions, using designed media. Amina has presented her work at the London Design Festival, Milan Furniture Fair, Venice Architecture Biannual, Critical Media Lab Switzerland, Harvard University America, the V&A, and Design museum, London.
Binelde Hyrcan is an Angolan artist that crosses themes of power, poverty, migration and inequality in his painting, sculptural, design, film and performative practice. The artists hard-hitting themes are delicately negotiated with humour, a seductive method of confronting the troubling realities of developing countries, and in particular Angola.
Łukasz Jastrubczak is a Polish artist who works in various mediums : video, installation, sculpture, concert, journey, ephemerical action. His solo exhibitions were presented at Art in General in New York, Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, CCA Kronika in Bytom or Sabot Gallery in Cluj-Napoca. In 2013 he received “Spojrzenia” (Views) – Deutsche Bank Foundation Award” for the most interesting young polish artist in the past two years. Member, with Krzysztof Kaczmarek, of the artistic duo “Krzysztofjastrubczak – łukaszkaczmarek”. Author, with Sebastian Cichocki, of the publication and events titled “Mirage”. He played on synthesizer in the bands “Boring Drug” and “ŁST”. Jastrubczak lives and works in Szczecin, Poland, where he works on Painting and New Media Department of Academy of Arts and where he co-directs with Zorka Wollny “Młode Wilki” festival, dedicated to visual and sound art.
Dietrich Meyer is a US artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Recent exhibitions include Babel (Berlin) and NCCA (St. Petersburg), as well as a forthcoming solo exhibition at The Landing Strip (Berlin) in September. He is a founding member of High Tide, a project space based in Philadelphia, PA. Dietrich works with plants that inhabit our spaces and the structures built to contain them. Dealing with the development of organisms around constructed geometrical environments, the conflict between organic growth and human precision become temporal structures in constant flux of floral expansion. Material, both natural and artificial, becomes a way of highlighting the complexities in notions such as labor, class, colonialism, human intervention, and climate.