Brno Art Open
Video installation by Filip Cenek presented as part of the exhibition of Sylva Lacinová’s sculpture at the Brno House of Arts.
The sculpture by artist Sylva Lacinová was originally installed on the building of the Associated Research Institutes in Brno. After the artwork was rescued from destruction — quite literally at the last minute — a crucial question unexpectedly remained unanswered: where and how should it find its new home?
This challenge eventually landed in the hands of the Brno Art Open 2019 curatorial team, which decided to include Lacinová’s piece in the exhibition — not merely as one of the featured works, but as its conceptual starting point.
The complex and often ambivalent discussions about how to exhibit Lacinová’s sculpture, and what new meanings it might gain through this “reframing,” became themselves a key theme of the reinstallation. These never-ending conversations about the sculpture’s placement and its uncertain future after the exhibition formed the basis of Filip Cenek’s video, which is presented within the installation as a kind of curatorial caption or commentary.
The piece reflects the cyclical and unresolved nature of these debates — and, more broadly, reveals how we (fail to) approach artworks that have lost their original context and purpose. In this way, the fragile fate of Lacinová’s sculpture echoes the stories of those who have been permanently displaced from the safety of home.
Team
Radim Brychta, Matyáš Dlab, Zdeněk Polák, Lucia Repašská, Zuzana Smutková a Magdalena Straková