Conversation Between Bear and Wolf

Curator: Ivana Hrončeková Text: Ivana Hrončeková, 2024 Photo: Jakub Podlesný, 2024

The overarching theme of the exhibition is the poem The Mad Wolf by avant-garde writer Nikolay Zabolotsky, which is brought to life in the exhibition byErika Velická’s sculptural installation. The figure of the mad wolf embodies the melancholy of the impossibility of achieving a utopian world without mutual exploitation and the depletion of natural resources, ideas that have returnedto art like a boomerang in the form of emoromanticism and posthumanism, among other things. Although the works in the exhibition deal with similar themes, sources, and above all emotions, they are not a typical representation of these trends. They delve much deeper into symbolism, mythology, alternative spirituality, imagination, and even a certain form of lyrical ecological and social activism, while recognizing the full breadth of the complexity of their starting points. They acknowledge their sincere uncertainty, contradictions, and fears through anthropomorphized characters from imagined or spoken stories: wolves and bears, forest ghosts, or plants and trees. A close relationship to literature and text, writing, or the transfer of literary models and various narratives into other forms is also one of the common features of the working methods of the authors and works represented in the exhibition.