Di Vý¹: Attention and its future versions

1. Di Vý is an abbreviation of DIplomantská VÝstava – graduates’ exhibition

We stare at the screen until our eyes burn. The sentences blur and the work is not done. We meet online. All the rooms, the spaces outside, the visits at our parents’ or partners’, the togetherness and our solitudes are connected by a thinly framed, silently glowing screen. We transform works into photographs and texts. Next call, individual meetings over individual works, call, presentation, description and another call.

What is happening to art in the age of digitalization of the world where our bodies, thoughts and emotions are also involved? How do the lockdowns experienced in previous years, that still reverberate in echoes, enter into the production and distribution conditions of art making? How and where does the attention that we lose and require at the same time shift? And are emotions, moods, and feelings data?

The preparations for Di Vý coincided with the last Covid wave in winter 2021. We were only able to work together again and meet in full intensity both inside and outside at the beginning of 2022, when the restrictions slowly started to loosen up. For a moment, we got unstuck from displays and screens, only to be drawn back to them on February 24, 2022 by the enormous magnetic force created by Putin’s Russia’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine. The individually experienced self-digitalization associated with work, studies and leisure was instantly and unexpectedly replaced by images of war atrocities, people fleeing their homes and simultaneous feelings of threat and helplessness. The war has become a powerful and traumatic reality for those who have relatives and friends in Ukraine, as well as for all those providing sympathy, support, and tangible help to Ukraine from near and far.

It is obvious that we entered the situation of an online-streamed war in a weakened shape, since its outbreak we have been looking for an explanation in a specific, somnambulistically hyper-individualized post-lockdown state, which is reflected in our work and everyday experience of what is happening inside and around us. Just like the online environment conditions which have, over the last two decades, transformed the art we watch on digital platforms (the subject of Tina Poliačková’s essay in this catalogue), the conditions in which we now experience our emotions are also shifting topics and contents from a position under our control to an external role that, in turn, controls and manipulates us.

This year’s curatorial intention was not defined by one specific topic, but primarily by the desire to devote as much care as possible to the presentation of individual works by graduates who are finishing their studies at the Academy of Fine Arts. Their display and presentation take place in the buildings and spaces of the school, which we view primarily in the context of a certain temporality that has already taken place, while looking towards what is yet to happen and what will determine the further development of things and events. The subliminal theme we discussed was therefore the desire for attention. Not in the sense of self-promotion on social media or in the digital environment, but rather in relation to the artwork, which longs to enter the world and speak, to cause something and become an active element or subject.

Following up on the discussions associated with the so-called emo-romantic turn in art in the first decade of the 21st century, we look into how emotions of today’s artworks can be treated in relation to their creation, description and presentation. At this year’s Di Vý, we want to ask and explore what kind of attention do the works themselves long for? What emotions do they simultaneously store and distribute, and how does starting to read them or feeling them determine their agency in the online environment? What happens in case of rejection of the online environment and its ever-changing conditions? Is it romantic not to want attention? Where are art and its shadow headed? Are yellow baseball caps attractive?

Di Vý presents forty-seven works by forty-eight graduates. The works are presented in the Main Building and the Modern Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts. We used the term “Di Vý” as a working title during the preparation of the graduates’ exhibition and in our email and online communication.

Anna Remešová and Tomáš Vaněk,
curators