Prague: More Than a Place to Party

Continuing our look at Prague this week, a recent survey named Prague as one of Europe’s top 10 party destinations.  While we don’t doubt that the Czechs know how to throw down, there’s a lot more to the city than charming squares, towers, and the ability to rock the night.

With a name that is reminiscent of the cold colourless constructions of the Eastern Blok, Designblok promises to be anything but lifeless.  The 12th annual selection of international designers to be presented in Prague will be showing their works in showrooms, boutique, and gallery exhibitions in the Holešovice, Karlíně, and Staré Město neighbourhoods of the city. The theme of the 2010 Designblok is water.  Although it isn’t exactly clear the role water will play, it has been chosen because the Vlvata River runs through all three neighbourhoods. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Brainard: Living Dead

A lot like the alien invasion film genre, which seems to come and go in waves depending on foreign policy and perceived “alien” threat without ever truly disappearing, the zombie film genre has had some serious staying power. Unlike those space aliens, however, the threat with zombies doesn’t come from some distant planet (or “Planet Russia,” if you’re watching a Cold War era film). With zombies it’s always your friends and neighbors who have turned into bumbling flesh-hungry hoards, and there’s always the threat that you too could join the mob of the living dead at the end of the world as we know it.

In Paul Brainard’s exhibition Living Dead, the metaphor of the zombie apocalypse is transformed easily into a luridly colored landscape of a homogenized media saturated consumerist society. Celebrities, anonymous faces, and even the artist himself form Brainard’s hoard of the living dead. As disconnected from each other as they are from the abstracted environment they inhabit, they stumble through undefined spaces overloaded and overlapping with imagery pulled from advertising, pop culture, religion, and pornography. Even with the depiction of perfect plastic flesh, rather than the zombie-typical rotting variety, the American born artist has created his own horror in a void of substance where images of everyday life evoke the emotional despair of a zombie wasteland.

If you’re traveling through Prague, stop by at Dvorak Sec Contemporary. Since the Prague Zombie Walk happens in May every year, you should be able to leave the living dead behind at the gallery door.

September 2 – November 16, 2010 at Dvorak Sec Contemporary, Dlouhá 5, 110 00 Prague, Czech Republic.

Opening hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 6pm and by appointment.

Stay at the ICON Hotel & Lounge in Prague.  Very much alive.

—

Categories: Prague, Art, Exhibitions

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

THE RACE: Tomas Dzadon and Valentino Diego

Holy motorbikes, Batman! They’re on Futurism’s tail!

Since Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the act of repairing (or also not repairing) a motorcycle can have pop-philosophical connotations. So whether you choose to view artist Tomas Dzadon’s 5-year project of restoring a 1940s NSU German motorcycle as a Pirsig-esque meditation on the “classical,” or just to say that the artist took inspiration from motorcycles, the time spent on the machine did lead to the contemplation of the mechanisms of the modernist era and contemporary art, as well as to the perhaps obvious, but nonetheless elegant, similarities in form to Otakar Švec’s iconic Futurist sculpture Sunbeam Motorcycle that can be seen in the National Gallery in Prague.

Alongside collaborator Valentino Diego, Dzadon has presented an interesting and fresh contribution to the critical dialogue surrounding the medium of sculpture, its historical direction and development, and its role in contemporary art. By placing an object sculpture, the restored motorcycle, next to a replica of Švec’s bronze, and all of this placed on top of a site-specific sculpture that creates a framework and impending physical challenge for our frozen racers with its steep incline, we are invited to consider the future of sculpture in terms of Newton’s first law of motion: “An object that is in motion will not change its velocity unless an unbalanced force acts upon it.” Have these two young artists provided enough of an unbalancing force to change the outcome of the race?

July 30 – September 26, 2010 at hunt kastner artworks, Kamenická 22, 170 00 Praha 7, Czech Republic. Tues. – Fri. from 1-6 pm and Sat. 2-6pm, or by appointment.

Planning to visit the exhibition, or indeed Prague itself, the ICON Hotel & Lounge is just a short motorbike blast away from the gallery.

—

Categories: Prague, Art

Contributing writer: Melissa Frost

CZECH ZEST

Set behind the rather grand 19^th Century façade created for the nobility of yesteryear, the ICON Hotel & Lounge is a very comfortable and refined modern address for the globe trotting gentry of today.

As with Prague itself, the building is laced with historical architectural references, but at the same time looks forward embracing a very modernist and unpretentious, with a decidedly good dash of citrusy Czech styling.

Add on the fab location from which to meander the almost Venice-like streets of old Prague, soak up some awesome culture or the local brew!, a dose of Czech personalities and you end with a perfect stylish place to crash without breaking the bank.

Want more, this way please.