curators: Jana Písaříková, Ondřej Chrobák, Petr Ingerle, Miroslav Maixner
The exhibition on the story of father Karel Valoch and his son Jiří Valoch explores the relationship between archaeology and conceptual art.
The discovery of a Neanderthal jaw fragment during the archaeological survey of the Kůlna cave in the Moravian Karst has become one of the most important events in post-war archaeology on a global scale. Karel Valoch and his son Jiří participated in this discovery. While Karel Valoch (1920-2013), an archaeologist at the Anthropos Institute in Brno, has been leading the survey of this site since 1961, student Jiří Valoch (1947) has spent his umpteenth summer vacation here as a part-time worker on excavations. Jiří Valoch preferred art to archaeology, and over the next few years, he became a visible protagonist of experimental poetry, a theoretician of new art and the curator of a number of key exhibitions, especially in the Brno House of Arts. However, archaeology and interest in prehistoric cultures had many points of contact with contemporary artistic practice, not only within one Brno family, as evidenced by the contemporary studies of the American curator Lucy R. Lippard. For example, various forms of rituals were performed in art at that time, which took place in nature, often in places with a prehistoric past or directly in caves. In the same way, large-scale artistic interventions were implemented in the landscape, the visual appearance of which could resemble megalithic buildings or archaeological sites. The current exhibition presents precisely these overlaps of archaeology and conceptual art, as they have permeated the lives of Karel and Jiří Valoch since the mid-sixties.
The exhibition includes artefacts and documentation associated with archaeological research in the Kůlna cave in the Moravian Karst, which was carried out by the Anthropos Institute under the leadership of Karel Valoch from 1961-1973.
Artists: Karel Adamus, Imre Bak, Peter Bartoš, Juraj Bartusz, Pavel Büchler, Vladimír Drápal, Stano Filko, Daniel Fischer, Hamish Fulton, Miroslav Sonny Halas, Vladimír Havlík, Pavel Holouš, Radek Horáček, Dalibor Chartný, Eva Kmentová, Milan Knížák, J.H.Kocman, Jef Kratochvil, Marie Kratochvílova, Július Koller, Petr Kvíčala, Miloš Laky, Otis Laubert, Richard Long, Marian Mudroch, Milan Maur, Rune Mields, Ladislav Novák, Meret Oppenheim, Marian Palla, Gerta Pospíšilová, Pavel Rudolf, Tomáš Ruller, Zorka Ságlová, Rudolf Sikora, Zdeněk Sklenář, Jan Steklík, Ladislav Snopko, Miloš Šejn, Petr Štembera, Margita Titlová Ylovsky, Jiří Valoch, Karel Valoch, Ralf Winkler (A.R. Penck), Jan Wojnar, Ján Zavarský.