Condition Report featured the work of six Czech artists from the Department of Photography at FAMU (the School of Film and Television of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague. Their work represents a range of contemporary art practices that are in some way rooted in photography and lens-based media. However, it would be misleading to say that the work reflects a particular ‘Czech style’ or tradition as the artists featured in Condition Report variously reference Fluxus, Surrealism, Futurism and Art Informel in their work.

Discovered reality predominates Katerina Drzkova’s Objet Invisible series, in which she uses braille, hapaesthetics (art for the blind) and photography to reveal the shortcomings of each communication method, which cannot capture the essence of the object represented. Radek and Zdenek Kveton uncover found objects in the Czech town of Terezin, a site in which the Nazis imprisoned Jewish intellectuals, prior to sending them to the death camps. The found objects are scanned and ordered into typologies, each image classified in forensic detail with a condition report. Vojtech Frohlich’s photographic landscapes of a hidden wood are then buried and exhumed several months later, enriching the image with the pigments and aroma of flora and soil. Jan Mericka deconstructs a photographic image composed of multiple exposures, reducing it to intersecting lines and chaotic scribbles that evoke Giacamo Balla’s Futurist masterpiece Dynamism of a Dog on a Lead. Finally, Tereza Prihodova scratches, burns and otherwise alters slides and negatives to create evocative collages and animations.

The approach of these younger artists may share certain characteristics such as playful experimentation, humour, an appeal to the subconscious and irrational, and the ability to combine traditional and modern processes of image-making to transform the everyday and mundane into the extraordinary. It could be argued they bring to the work as certain Czech sensibility, but make no mistake about it, all the artists are connected intellectually to the ideas and influences of a wider international art scene.

The exhibition Condition Report: New Photographic Art from the Czech Republic was presented at Ffotogallery in October 2010 with an accompanying publication designed by Helena Santava and printed in Prague.