PD Petr Dub

The barrier erected by Petr Dub in the middle of the arcade offers more than this semantic syuzhet. Especially the frontal view from the square, from which the wall appears to be completely impervious and the museum to be open, also leads to reflections on the contemporary role of cultural institutions, such as museums or galleries. What role do they play in the society, how do they communicate with the public, and to what degree is their intercourse with the public the contents of their activities. Building a wall, dividing both the physical and the mental space between the inside and the outside, the museum and the ordinary world, in this case refers to the effort to define the transition between attention and the ignorance of the viewer and the obligations of the operators of cultural institutions. Namely the problem does not lay merely in the fact that the majority of the population is subconsciously afraid of visiting those institutions, but also in the fact that their ideas of unassailable (cultural) fortress are profusely fed by the institutions themselves by their lack of communication skills, arrogance, rigidity of ideas, or anachronistic conception of presentation of their collections. The mutual detachment is thus comfortable for both parties and the obstacle in turn becomes a protective element, which is sarcastically reflected in the title of the exhibition “The Merry and the Happy”, referring to the state of mind of the people dwelling on either side of the wall. Read more from the press release by Tomáš Knoflíček here…