17/12/11 – 17/01/12
Divus, Bubenska 1, Prague, Czech Republic
This exhibition housed in the former headquarters of the Czechoslovak Republic Central Electricity and Transport Division in downtown Prague publishes the results of a six week residency undertaken by the artist during September/October 2011 in The Czech Republic.
Centering around the massive extraction of brown coal near the northern city of Most, the work uncovers the convoluted narratives imbedded in coal as a politically charged material, and presents it as a fossilized component of Georges Bataille’s ‘Solar Economy’ – not as a problematic inherently evil material, but as a gallant vegetative resistance against the thermonuclear holocaust at the center of our solar system – the Sun.
Charting the recent transferral of this solar hegemony, played out through industrially charged Bolshevik pride and the expansionist machinations of modern global capital (post Velvet Revolution) the research attempts to identify nodal points in 360,000,000 year old story that ends with the human unwittingly becoming the hand maiden of the Sun in its universal drive towards pyromanical mega death.
The work is presented as a giant hand painted wall diagram and time-line, interspersed with objet trouvé and a separate wall projection.
Included in the show:
A display of genuine coaly artifacts – including lignite (brown coal) from the pits in the north of the Czech Republic – processed through the imaginative filter of young inhabitants of Prague during a participatory ‘Coal Fun Workshop’.
Examples of hyper-accelerationism – the destruction of Most during 1969 - 1975, one of Bohemia’s finest gothic cities, for the extraction of coal (through solar complicity), and its subsequent rebuild as an impotent Modernist dream park.
Evidences of an ancient alchemical brotherhood, and a pact with the malefic inner black Sun – the spurious involvement of English alchemists and a 500 hundred year old curse that ripped through communities.
The Solar Fuck Club – an explicit Kama Sutra guide to solar resistance.
Screenings of vintage Bolshevik propaganda films describing the physical movement of the largest stone structure ever transported in one piece – the 10,000 tonne church of old Most.
A ‘Coal Fun Station’ – where the public is invited to paint lumps of brown coal with their own designs
Download accompanying project text here
Link to: Prager Kabarett Website
Link to: Divus Website