Make Voices Be Heard: Chapter Four
The fourth and final chapter of the Fotograf Festival introduces the work of ten artists at the MeetFactory gallery. Central to the exhibition is Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi’s 2023 five-channel projection, Theater of Life. When Koizumi was invited to the 14th biennale in the South Korean city of Gwangju, he collaborated with people of Korean origin who had escaped Russia for South Korea after the beginning of the war in Ukraine to create an unusual video performance. Taking their inspiration from the traditional Korean Goryeo theatre, established in the 1930s by Koreans deported do Kazakhstan, the emigrés focused on issues of cultural identity that allowed them to confront their own situation. The result is a poetic installation filled with alienation, sadness, and desire, radiating not only energy but also dignity and determination.
Belarusian artist Alina Bliumis will present a series of photographs created in 2020 titled Center of Europe. The series documents various locations that are sometimes referred to as the centre of Europe, found in Belarus, Slovakia, and Poland. Ukrainian artist Yevgenie Belorusets’s 2021 collection of photographs Kristina’s Tagdocuments with thrilling immediacy the everyday life of Roma communities that had to leave their homes due to the war. Slovak Romani artist Emília Rigová will stage her own Oltář (Altar), composed of artefacts relating to her identity.
Identity is also the subject of contributions by two representatives of the Vietnamese community in Prague. The twelve-minute film Love, Dad (2021) by Diana Cam Van Nguyen, an internationally acclaimed film that has been awarded multiple prizes, is a humorous and dexterously animated short about the conflicts between traditional Vietnamese norms and the expectations of contemporary liberal society. Ming Thang Pham also explores issues of cultural identity. He currently lives in Vietnam where he is studying the traditional, 8000-year-old technique of lacquer painting. His experiments with this technique will be introduced at this exhibition for the first time. The fate of Vietnamese workers, especially seamstresses in the 1970s and ’80s, in connection to her own fate sewing shirts for Russian soldiers in Czechoslovakia after 1968, is the subject of Šičky (The Seamstresses, 2008) by Sráč Sam, located at the end of the wooden tunnel.
Memory, the manipulation of historical memory, and the creation of false heroic myths are the subjects of Memory is an Animal Which Barks With Various Mouths, a 2023 video by Jeanna Kolesová, a Russian artist who proficiently uses the most up-to-date possibilities of electronic equipment. In another two-channel installation, “SURFACES THAT MATTER: Youth Day 1988” (2022), Marta Popivoda, an artist from Serbia, collaborated with theorist Ana Vujanović to explore the social choreography of the last days of socialist Yugoslavia and the relationship between the individual and the collective body. This exploration is based on the archive of the Youth Day mass performance organized in Yugoslavia in 1988. This screening can also be understood as a reference to the gripping performances at today’s pop concerts. The Belarusian artist working under the moniker Ptuška and Georgian artist Keto Gorgadze introduce their Thyroxia (2023), a chilling document of the irresponsible response to the threats present after the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in 1986, which was also motivated by Russia’s thoughtless colonial approach to neighbouring countries.
