This exhibition prepared for the Brno House of Arts by the Rafani artists' group in conjunction with two curators represents for the most part an entirely new project by the Rafanis and the first curated retrospective of their work to date, presented by curator Günther Holler-Schuster from the Neue Galerie in Graz and Edith Jeřábková.
Observing what is happening to the general and basic social category which society has divided off from nature using rules is a sign of the development and current state of that society. More than once (no need to recall and look around) art itself has built itself more or less intuitively into relations with sporting disciplines. In this, the Rafani take an entirely constructive and metaphorical approach. Viewing from outside and appropriately generalised, they monitor these two fields which since the Velvet Revolution have fought incommensurably for sponsors' favour. The thing which links art and sport, the rules, are to be found at the second, consumer level, and in fact separate them in principle. Art, and avant garde art by its nature, should overcome rules, demonstrate new ones, and put tritely, should change the world. In sport one keeps to the rules and within them strives to achieve ever greater perfection, showing society our interest in maintaining the given order, within which there is still scope for climbing higher. So through this comparison one discipline is shown in its essence to be progressive, and the other conservative. Both ideas, inside and outside the rules, have their analogies in political structures. The exhibition deals with their individual parameters: perfection of the body, technical means, success measurement, maintenance of hierarchy, promotion of an ideal, the grotesqueness of effort, androgynous harmony, heroification through struggle, reproduction, mechanical origins, mass, community, identity.
"Art creates issues, sport stabilises. As embryos of disputes and difference we are placing small enclosed spaces into the principal space of the exhibition; these will work with the concepts of evil, fantasy and humour" (Rafani).