Precursor

First opening 6. 12. 17 – 21h
From 7.-10. December open daily 16–19h
Openings every day

Isabela Grosseova and Jesper Alvær

Precursor (Reflections on empty objects as an experience to come)

This exhibition is a fifth case-study in a cluster of all 7 research exhibitions under the general AVU research project by the authors titled Shortcomings … The exhibition in the gallery Berlinskej Model in Prague, is taking place in December 2023. Title of the exhibition is Precursor (Reflections on empty objects as an experience to come) and is ideally functional as a preparation of an audience. Due to the short duration of this exhibition, each opening day of the exhibition is treated as vernissage.

In addition, the full collection of the printed works from the anonymous workshop Graphic Unconscious (2018-2023) will be visually present in the gallery, to decorate the gallery walls.
A new “artwork” in preparation, is taking place through several performances, in the form of a series of one-to-one encounters. The theme is “about and relating to a group of other disclosed artworks”: a framework initiated to prepare an audience for a delayed experience of those concrete works, coming after in time.

Isabela Grosseová and Jesper Alvaer have collaborated in a range of previous exhibitions and exhibition proposals before, often addressing the contemporary art exhibition format and Precursor, is one more example of addressing a concern. Most of the exhibitions elaborated by Isabela Grosseová and Jesper Alvaer emerged from a post-Fordist economy, in which consumption and production are conflated.

Through the stages of the preliminary workshops and the various imposed rules and itineraries that imply how the audience are allowed to enter and move in the exhibitions, Isabela Grosseová and Jesper Alvaer attempt to intervene in the commodification of creativity and how this commodification eradicates imagination, instead hoping to ‘rejuvenate innate human capacities of making and contemplating.’

On the one hand, this commodification applies to the increasing demand to self-market “creative” skills in non artistic forms of labor. But, on the other hand, it also applies to traditional modes of exhibition-making. This commodification and eradication of the imagination operates not only in terms of producing art for a market but also in the process of proposing and framing artistic research and exhibition making, which often requires the artist to make certain claims about the ends of a creative process before the process has been initiated, while foreclosing the imaginative space that the work might seek to produce.

This same model generally applies to how an institution frames an exhibition or how the audience might enter it, already having a sense of the intended meaning or an interpretation of the work before they’ve experienced it. Isabela Grosseová and Jesper Alvaer seek to decenter traditional protocols of exhibition and viewership by occupying the cracks opened by an aesthetic experience in order to reactivate the visitor’s capacities to imagine, create, and articulate.

The previous case four studies in this series of research exhibitions include: 2020 Exhibition as Alibi (Výstava jako alibi), Gallery Display, Prague (CZ), 2020 Audience without artwork (Diváci bez uměleckého díla) Biennale: Matter of Art, Tranzit.cz, Prague (CZ), 2019 Pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-view / Audience first (Ná-, ná-, ná-, ná-, ná-hled / Diváci jako první) – galery sam83, Česká Bříza (CZ), 2018 Audience has a Value / Group of Engaged Audience (Skupina Angažovaných Diváků), intervention into an exhibition, Galerie TIC, Brno (CZ)