Emergency. Preparing for the future

Straddling contemporary utopian and catastrophic discourses, the exhibition will present artists and artist collectives working with visions of the future as an alternative to endless material growth, suggesting the shift in perspective needed in the current state of emergency, preparing for the future by cultivating the necessary skills and creating networks and communities. They have a connection to 'prepperism', a movement whose members consciously prepare for disaster. Similar tendencies, which have been present in society since at least the Cold War and the threat of nuclear catastrophe, have now been re-amplified by the ongoing war in Ukraine and the recent experience of the epidemic of covid, with its attempts to simplify life, frugality, generosity, and the questioning of travel and mass action. Like ordinary people, many artists respond to the state of emergency in their work.

The selected projects are on the border of art, science and activism, perceiving art as a tool of more than human ethics, exploring the limits of the anthropocentric point of view by sensitivity to non-human organisms. They use processes inspired by science, working with biological and technical data, methods of visualization and sonification, but also respond to craft traditions, handicraft, DIY. Artists who work with space (sculpture, installation), sometimes in combination with sound, are largely represented in the selection. Non-human organisms (biological and otherwise) have their own trajectories, which in urban space necessarily intersect with human trajectories. These are not only animal and plant inhabitants, but also, for example, various technical structures, networks, sensors or cameras. The exhibition will trace these intersections and traces, the boundaries and permeability of urban spaces and ways of perceiving them. MYBAS (a prepper acronym, meaning "may you be among the survivors"). 

The addressed artists will create works adapted to the exhibition space of the House of the Lords of Kunštát. The exhibition will include, among others: Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán (RO), Tamás Kaszás (HU), Michal Machciník (SK), Martyna Poznańska (PL), Pavla Sceranková, Ruta Putramentaite.