CONTINGENT PROPOSITIONS

A piecemeal, visually-oriented study of the background and historical consequences of late capitalism, its practices and outcomes led me to create comments and references, to my own version of footnotes. In order to orient myself better in this, I employed the tried and tested procedures of modernist collage, inspired by Baroque emblems complemented with text sections. My material consisted of newspaper cuttings from the Communist daily Rudé právo(1971-1989) and the post-revolutionary liberal daily Lidové noviny (1989-2008). On the basis of these local Czech newspaper sources mapping the demise of the two dominant ideological monsters of the 20th century, I am sketching out the coordinates of an as yet undisclosed global future. The recycling of documents of the past reveals clues leading to the Great Recession in 2008 and is perhaps also a reflection of the next form of the post capitalist world. Naturally in all modesty and within the bounds of possibility of an artist's comments.

Zbyněk Baladrán

Zbyněk Baladrán (born 1973 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is an author, visual artist and curator. He studied art history at the Charles University Philosophical Faculty in Prague from 1992-1996, and from 1997-2003 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of visual communication. He is one of the co-founders and a curator of Galerie display, which was established in Prague in 2001, and in 2007 merged with tranzit.cz into tranzitdisplay, where he continues to oversee the exhibition program. He is also the co-curator, with Vít Havranek, of the project and exhibitions Monument to Transformation, a 3-year research project on social transformation that was presented in 2009 at the Prague City Gallery, and which traveled to several other locations in Europe later this year. Baladrán was also a part of the team of curators (tranzit.org) for Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain in 2010. His artworks can be characterized as the search for links between the past and itsconstruction in relation to the prevailing epistemological patterns. His works arerepresented in various international private and public collections.

His recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Frieze Projects, London (2013), Kunstverein (Milan) (2012), and Castillo/ Corrales, Paris (2008). He has also participated in the following group exhibitions: Film as Sculpture, Wiels, Brussels (2013); Nouvelles impressions de Raymond Roussel, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); the Seoul Biennale; the Rennes Biennale (2012); Cartographies, La Caixa, Barcelona; Du monde clos à l’univers infini, Le Quartier, Quimper (2012); the Lyon Biennale (2011; Erudition Concrète 3, Le Plateau – Frac Ile de France, Paris (2010). He represented the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale in 2013.

Legends Photos - Pdf

Zbyněk Baladrán - CV