I observe without perceiving

Aleš Loziak is the first author of the Entrance Gallery’s year project that is focused on PhD students of art universities, their topics and, moreover, the very meaning and sense of studying a PhD program at Czech art universities.

As a PhD student of the Visual Communication Programme as well as an assistant of the Department of Photography, Loziak is interested in the media of photography theoretically but also practically – through its interpretation, perception and installation in space. In his abstract for the Entrance Gallery, he speaks of ‘Svoboda-Tillmans Intermezzo’ and thus he defines his approach to the work.

If Tillmans is interested in exhibiting only the photographed and does not want to suggest to the viewer some other, even if corresponding, stories, we can search, in that moment, for a similarity with Svoboda’s photographs that thematise themselves. Furthermore, if we are to understand Svoboda’s photographs as distinctive records that cross borders of the photographic media towards an object or image of painting-like features, we can better understand what Aleš Loziak calls the difference between photograph as a media and the content of the photographic image. In the contemporary art, there is no need to stress the difference between a traditional installation of photographs and an installation that denies these prejudicial ways of presentation. Visual art has already freed photography. In this respect, Jan Svoboda’s approach was very innovative and he surely was one of the first artists-photographers who approached such understanding of installation photography not only in the Czech artistic scene. Although Aleš does come back to these transition moments in the theoretical part of his dissertation work and he tries to define them, perhaps to understand them better, he naturally and confidently crosses these borders in his own artistic work (and we can intentionally skip referring to it as ‘only’ photography). Aleš smuggles moving images into his installation prepared for the Entrance Gallery. He calls them video-haiku but they differ from other photographs only in the fixed number of images per second. These images finish, more or less, what has been suggested in the other photographs and what Aleš makes us see behind the obvious.

The everydayness of a landscape is only a hint to understand the fact that the landscape that we focus on is truly and perfectly ordinary in the most diverse way.

Text / Tereza Velíková

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I personally call this project ‘the Svoboda-Tillmans Intermezzo’ since one cannot deny that it was inspired by these iconic photographers. For me, as well as for these authors, the photography represents a synthesis of an image (the space that is interpreted in it), lens (the motif on the photograph but also its substance) and the chosen way of its installation in the gallery space, which I perceive as an important meaning-bearing element in my work. I enter this world with my own inventiveness in the form of moving image, i.e. video-haiku, static minute videos in which seemingly, as in the photographs, nothing much happens. The installation (photographs of different sizes and ways of installation with videos) creates a thoughtful visual game.

Text / Aleš Loziak