The “Space of Memory” Symposium in Šternberk

Věra Jirousová

The focal point of the International Art Symposium in Šternberk is to save the Augustinian monastery, which, together with the Late Baroque church and medieval castle, forms the unforgettable architectural cityscape of this Moravian town. This year's symposium, entitled Space of Memory, took place in the monastery in the second half of July, with thirty artists from ten countries taking part. At the same time, two exhibitions and a review of art works, combined with a number of various events, took place. In the beginning the artists presented their work in the local Galerie Šternberk and at the end there was a show of artwork created during the symposium in the monastery complex, out of which a group of works was selected for display at Galerie G in nearby Olomouc.

The organisers of this challenging event, Michal Kalhous - curator of the local gallery, the architect Blanka Zlamalová, the painter Petr Zlamal, international aide - Edith Jeřábková and symposium curator - Ladislav Daněk from the Olomouc Museum of Art, worked together during the preparations and realisation of the symposium with the town cultural affairs department in Šternberk, the monuments commission and the Union of Visual Artists of Olomouc. An important component of this international symposium is the reality that the artists of North Moravia can work in improvised workshops in the monastery and communicate in a framework of shared conceptions with international participants. Great artistic experience and precise implementation for example distinguished the inventive work of artists from England: the video projection of Mark Dixon was inspired by the Baroque frescoes in the monastery and brought the faces of several attending artists into the historic context of the Augustinian monks and projected these "new images" onto the ceiling of the entryway. Tom Crompton's installation embraced the form of the welt-test, in which self-made items with a refined sense of humour comment on "military" games as a typical phenomenon of today's world, where peace is secured through weaponry. A great sense for the accurate meaning of things and at the same time for improvisation was displayed by the pair of artists from the Netherlands: Wim Barends and Robert van Dolron, who on the ground floor of the monastery constructed an interior chapel of hardened sheets of cardboard, and invited visitors to enter one-at-a-time into the darkened space and there each thought about the meaning of religion in the past and today. Graziella Berger and Claudia Bucher, artists from Switzerland, at present work together; at the exhibition and at the symposium they presented imaginative team work. In the gallery their photographic collages were connected to the best tradition of street art, in the monastery cloisters they introduced the live movement of their silhouettes, captured in action poses. In the huge dimensions of space and time in the monastery arose at the same time a strongly contemplative group of wax sculptures by Ute Wennrich of Germany, who used non-traditional materials in her work, but also computer technology, which placed the works into a complex social framework of presence. Her colleague, Christiane Firchow of Berlin, created one of the most effective installations, confronting the socialist realism look in one of the monastery rooms with a picture of a landscape furnished with ideological ballast. On one side, the panorama of the Šternberk landscape with a tank of the liberators - Red Army soldiers and smoking factory chimneys; on the opposite wall, a picture of a forested hill slope, which was made out of pages from a note pad. The Japanese artist Noriko Matsumura created several small object installations, in which she spontaneously used materials available in the monastery premises. One of the Austrian participants, Walter Wittman of Vienna, intrigued me with his paintings. Italian artists Carlo Mastronardi and Corrado Tagliati created traditional images with expressive and abstract forms at the symposium.

Bigger part of Czech artists at the symposium concerned themselves with painting, and sometimes with photography. Many of them work and paint here in North or Central Moravia. Vladimir Havlík's abstract paintings evoked great respect, his work at the exhibition and work from the symposium introduced one of the living lights of contemporary painting. Similar appreciation was deservedly given to a collection of characteristic paintings of black and white structures by Pavel Hayek of Brno. Especially his large-format painting created during the symposium, which concentrated in itself the meditative content of centralised painting in the reclusion of the monastery. Jitka Anlaufová's paintings were a direct reaction to the Baroque architecture with its long corridors, especially excellent was her computer retouched photography, which commented on the phenomenon of light in the monastery.

Milena Dopitová presented an installation at the symposium with a number of children's swings hung from the ceiling and a spell-binding video projection of a dream dance study on a time-loop, where an ageing pair danced together - the famed dancer Žukov and his prima ballerina partner. The artist of this nostalgic scene dedicated to the theme of the elderly, ageing and memory portrayed with acute attention one of the emotional big themes. Her audio-visual story of an ageing dancer and her partner in its sensitive warmth put the finishing touches on a symposium on the confrontation of the past and the present with the expressive dimension of man. The figurative painting of Eliška Jakubíčková, who lived in Šternberk in her youth, also touched on the theme of memory, unfurling personal memory, caught in period photography of the 1960s. She was inspired by the monastery architecture in her collection of painted sketches. The small monochrome paintings of Jiří Hastík, on which each of the participants painted something, exemplified primarily communication. Marek Trizuljak presented a collection of photography, upon which are fragments of the monastery's construction. His installation made out of bricks as same as the installation in the monastery corridor by Klára Mičíková were reactions to the surrounding space. Ivan Krajíček Brot brought to the symposium a collection of his intentionally "brutal" and wildly coloured collage paintings with elements of kitsch. Richard Stipl of Canada also used irony, the grotesque, and kitsch in his sculptures and paintings. An introduction to the fiery images of the Latvian artists Agris Dzilna and Solvita Zarina took place in the outdoor public space of the Šternberk town square. Jiří Surůvka was oriented at the symposium primarily on his famed cabaret; with the assistance of Petr Lysáček, musicians and students of the art school in Ostrava presented various "hard-boiled" scenes. As ever, some laughed, others were offended; to entertain people is always a thankless job.

As the greatest contribution to the symposium, it was regarded that here many artists created their works directly in the unique space of the Augustinian monastery, making local citizens and visitors aware of its architectural value and helping to contribute something towards saving this historical monument. Several artists reacted to the atmosphere of this abandoned sacral space and confronted this "space of memory" with ideas of the modem world.

(The text of Věra Jirousová was published in the Catalogue on Symposium and in the most important Artistic journal of the Czech Republic: “ATELIÉR”, Prague, 2005)