FFA Graduates 2023 – Echo Chamber Lexicon

The Brno House of Arts, House of the Lords of Kunštát, Dominikánská 9, Brno
22 June 2023 – 16 July 2023
https://www.dum-umeni.cz/en/echo-chamber-lexicon/t9293 

Opening programme: 16:00 opening, 17:00 concert Miss Petty, 18:30 concert VIAH
Special guests: Mirela Baciak, Thomas Conchou, Tjaša Pogačar
Curators: Julie Béna, Jakub Jansa
Graphic design: Maria Gritskevich, Maria Vakhtierova

Diploma exhibitions and catalogues are a specific genre in the art world. Every year students and curators have to re-evaluate the meaningfulness of this format. They alternate between more invasive approaches (the curators modify the students‘ works to increase the impact of the exhibition as a whole) and approaches that allow for the diversity and specificity of individual works and disciplines, but at the risk of inconsistent results. The presentation of the FFA BUT is even more specific in that it simultaneously presents the output of both free and applied art). This year, as the curators, we decided to define this format as a service. A service leading to an inconspicuous yet, from our point of view, important result. We do not remix the works, we do not come up with spectacular architecture, nor do we try to pack everything into the form of a charming joke or a community gesture. We look at the exhibition and the catalogue in a very utilitarian way, seeking practical outputs—tools that can serve students after they leave their alma mater. The central point of this less visible service was to address ten selected theorists, art historians, and curators. As for the texts, they were assigned a very clear task. We want all the authors’ texts to be as similar in structure as possible. They should not be philosophical or poetic or the author‘s interpretation of their work, but a factual description of the medium and subject they are working with and whether a specific working method can already be observed. It may seem that this kind of writing reduces the authors to mere production labels, but in fact it helps in orientation, by describing the essential characteristics of the work in a direct and comprehensible way that documentation often fails to achieve. It may not sound important, but we only came to such texts after years of practice, and they would have clearly helped us in our applications for various grants or art open calls after our graduation. We also believe that contemporary artists are not a group of marginalised geniuses who are working just for themselves and are waiting to be discovered only after their death. They are personalities who are part of a lively professional debate and they can communicate their ideas, establish new topics and actively shape discussions. Therefore, as an additional service, we have decided to invite the selected curators who the students would meet during the opening of the exhibition (Mirela Baciak, Thomas Conchou, Tjaša Pogačar). At the beginning of the year we met with all the students to explain how we imagined the project would be implemented. We also told them that this process could be painful or complicated, that this was life, that every exhibition, every catalogue was a kind of test that one was rarely satisfied with. In the end, this first encounter is probably as it is now; a mixture of emotions, points of view, happiness and fear, excitement and misunderstanding, trust and doubt, whispers and ghosts. All the people involved in this experience gave what they could when they could. A project with 40 people is never a long and calm river, but one thing is for sure; we have done it at least once in our lives. That one day we will together make something that is now in your hands and in front of your eyes, and that something is not insignificant, because it means time, being together, the end, but most importantly, the beginning of life after school.

Catalogue: https://www.favu.vut.cz/en/publishing/f147703/d265532