In the first district of Prague, a short distance from the Old New Synagogue (Czech: Staronová synagoga; German: Altneu-Synagoge) and with a direct view across the Vltava, stands Galerie KodlContemporary: a light-flooded glass structure whose load-bearing architecture runs like a skeleton through the interior, inviting yet more light inside. This is a place that wishes to receive the world as its guest. And makes no secret of it.
With the current exhibition Timeline, the Kodl team has struck a nerve of the present. That much is certain. Which nerve, precisely, is reserved for those willing to submit to a very high density of references? An attempt at a brief orientation follows in a later paragraph.
First, a structural observation. What we have here, after all, is a young gallery with deep roots in recent cultural history, positioning itself in one of the most historically charged cities in the world. The Old New Synagogue mentioned above is, for instance, the oldest active synagogue on earth. So, where is the contemporary heading?
From a purely strategic standpoint, the invitation of Nicolas Bourriaud and Barbara Lagié as curators is a masterstroke. Bourriaud ranks among the most important theorists and curators at the threshold of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, founding adviser to the Pinchuk Foundation in Kyiv, and instrumental in the establishment of some of the most significant institutions for contemporary art in the world. He has directed biennials in Lyon, Moscow, Taipei, Istanbul, and Gwangju and held positions at universities and international exhibition venues across the globe. Paired with Barbara Lagié, artistic director of the Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, the result is a curatorial constellation that thinks about art well beyond the confines of pompous receptions and the question of which sparkling wine to serve at the opening. This foundation alone makes clear: although the place we’re looking at is a gallery, something considerably more than art dealing is intended here. Perhaps a touch too much?
The title itself, in its abstraction, opens the gate to, well, to everything, really. To what it means to be an artist; to how artists, but also all of us human beings, form part of an omnipresent ecosystem; to how everything stands in relation to everything else; and to how the prism we call the world remains the same prism regardless of the angle from which one looks. Nicolas Bourriaud terms this phenomenon of being-thrown-into-the-world “relational spaces” — spaces in which contemporary art and artists come to understand nature not as a collection of objects but as a vast relational web of subjects and their agencies. So far, so far.
The concrete starting point of the exhibition is a series of illustrations by František Kupka — perhaps the most important Czech avant-gardist, who participated in documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955, two years before his death. Before Kupka became one of the foremost Czech exponents of abstract painting, he was invited at the turn of the twentieth century to illustrate the final book of the French activist and geographer Élisée Reclus: Man and the Earth. Those familiar with Kupka’s abstract canvases may be surprised by these specific, figurative drawings. Those expecting a group exhibition re-contextualizing Kupka’s œuvre through young contemporary positions drawn primarily from Eastern Europe will find themselves comprehensively led astray. Those willing, however, to yield to the all-encompassing narrative of this exhibition will find a broadly arching web of meaning that is nothing less than the embodiment of a strategic reorientation, of our world but also of the exhibition’s place itself.
Élisée Reclus, in the nineteenth century, articulated thoughts on eco-social responsibility that prefigure our current debate on the Anthropocene. He was a founding member of the International Workers’ Movement at the 1862 World Exhibition in London and anticipated virtually every core idea of contemporary veganism long before the term “speciesism” had been defined. Reclus’s works exhaust themselves in metaphor, among them a publication describing a river from source to mouth, on how human beings shape their environment, and how, in that shaping, the history of humanity becomes legible in the landscape. From the study of nature, Reclus argued, the history of man can be read.
Kupka’s illustrations are a largely unknown relic of an engagement with a figure who was himself a formative presence for the cultural history of a twentieth century that went catastrophically off the rails in its first half in its treatment of the natural world. Reckless industrialization and two world wars left long-term traumatic consequences for both humanity and nature alike.
With Timeline, the curators remind us that a glance at history, a step back, can very often prove enormously instructive. Kupka’s illustrations depict nations, peoples, lands, but also revolution, religion, and science: illustrated conceptions of the world and of worldly interconnection. These quiet witnesses to a vanished body of knowledge are flanked by international positions from India, Belarus, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Estonia, France, and Belgium. Also noteworthy: not a single position from the gallery’s own program has been pressed into the curation. The exhibition’s central argument reveals itself in demonstrating that the international alliance of ideas between Reclus and Kupka is today (in content and in form) every bit as relevant as it was over a hundred years ago. Artists including Marguerite Humeau, Katja Novitskova and Patrick Van Caeckenbergh bring with them both international perspectives and genuine institutional weight. We are, after all, speaking of artists represented in the most important collections worldwide, whose backgrounds carry discursive relevance at biennials across the globe. Equally remarkable is how seamlessly the works of Charles Avery, Alex Červený and Suzanne Treister connect formally to Kupka; how, from a fusion of text and image, graphic attempts at explaining the world continue to emerge.
During the second half of the twentieth century, Eastern European countries, weakened under the red terror, were long unable to radiate the international prominence in which they shine today. Exhibitions like that are landmarks in this new departure for Eastern Europe: places that, despite all political oscillation between extremism and radicality, continue toinvest in international alliances, international exchange, and the practice of learning from one another. This kind of learning does not unfold in quick bites, in bite-sized tours through global gallery weekends where the fastest circuit wins the best price. This learning requires time.
In this respect, Timeline fits the place precisely. No blockbuster show, no great fanfare. Rather, a quiet invitation to engage, through sustained looking, with a large web of meaning. And for the gallery: an important milestone in a strategy designed for the long view. Good things, after all, take time.
Timeline is open to visitors until June 7.