Divided Spaces
Traces /// Visions

Part II – Visions
at Notgalerie - DREAM ESTATE

Lucie Nováčková / Martin Vlček
a collaboration project between Pragovka Gallery Prague and Notgalerie

We start at 6pm with the finest music provided by Eren Duman
His style began with deep house music and as a producer over the years this developed into his preferred style of indie dance / melodic house & techno. He also organizes events and plays in Vienna with his crew Mosaiek.
https://soundcloud.com/erenduman

ARTIST TALK starting at 9 pm
Notgalerie - DREAM ESTATE - Urbanes Feld bei U2 Aspern Nord, 1220 Wien - www.dreamestate.at

For about Part I - Traces (taking place at LLLLLL space on August 5) please visit link: https://www.facebook.com/events/1123189258210239)

Divided Spaces – Traces /// Visions is the first part of an collaboration series between PRAGOVKA GALLERY and NOTGALERIE.
Pragovka Gallery is an autonomous Gallery Project in Prague with a wide range of tasks and functions. It emerged out of an act of appropriation and subsequent use of an old factory site. The project started in this factory, situated at the outskirts of the city, when a big company began a renovation process of the area. For almost ten years of studios existing in the area, that in the beginning had a feeling of an interim use of an space in transition, continuously grew during 3-4 years into a form of an Prague art institution.
In a sequence of conversations that took place in a period over the last year the inventors and core members of each project investigated each others concepts and experiences. These talks showed many similarities in each others origins, strategies, fears, goals, problems and successes that both projects, PRAGOVKA and NOTGALERIE went through over the years.
One key element in both projects seems to be that both representatives of Pragovka, in their origins, are not gallerists or curators but artists themselves. These positions determine the directions of which the concepts emerged and made their consequent ways over the years from inside an art system described by needs and visions of the artists themselves.
The moment Lucie Novácková and Martin Vlcek show their own artistic work in two of the Viennese Spots of Notgalerie creates a Simulacrum. The determination of the institutional practice that grew from an artistic approach, strong enough to reach a similar construction, enables a short moment of silence. In this quietness Lucie and Martin place their works in an exhibition setting that takes place in these two very different Art Places run by Reinhold Zisser (creator of Notgalerie) in Vienna.
Lucie Nováčková, artist and artdirector of Pragovka Gallery creates Installations in which she retranslates moments of her cultural work as well as impressions and feelings from more personal impressions. In her postition as head of an institution she self created she finds herself and her institutional system of Pragovka Gallery work in a system that Foucault described as Heteropia.
“Real places, effective places drawn into the institution of society, counter-placements or abutments, so to speak, actually realized utopias in which the real places within culture are simultaneously represented, contested and turned, places outside of all places, as it were, however they can actually be located”
Michel Foucault:Die Heterotopien/Der utopische Körper
Her own art work, on the other side, grows up from totally different positions:
The fibre materials that she is working with in her installations are symbols of two completely different moments. On the one hand symbols of a classic female craft with its spiritual power based up on female weavers positions in certain nomadic cultures. At the same time and in our west circumstances, symbol of a disruption in which a system has been dissected down to its last parts. Through the open warp technology, she using as the base for her installations, she confronts the viewer with the feeling of emptiness, loss and non-repeting situations presented by repetitive acts, during which the names of the work are pointing at the parallel of the warping the text and material she uses, which both are revealing something hidden.
Martin Vlček is in his art work focusing on moments of dissapearance of public and personal places. This fascination led him also to have a studio at Pragovka and finally be part of Pragovka Gallery as an assistent. For his Viennese installations he brought objects that represent his constant and utopistic passion to transfer a potential and atmosphere of lost places to a new context in order to create a new small environment. Old neon light lamps collected from the building E in Pragovka area with studios, café and galleries, are used to rebuild/remember a year ago demolished site (Hall No. 9) within the area. As a contrast to these icons of self represantation stands the material of plaster that he is using for his second part of the installations. Martin Vlček describes plaster as a material used for making sculptures and copies combined with vires evoking 3D models, the virtuality, (non)existing reality and an imprint of past.
The first part of the exhibition Divided Spaces - Traces takes part at LLLLLL artist run space (www.LLLLLL.at)
The essential marks of the installation of both artists are the ones of absence of the treated object.
Martin Vlcek shows in his work The hands of Tiba never stop working a video installation documenting the attempt to reactivate an already past history inscribed in the site of an abandoned textile factory in a performance. The installation evoking a camera and a total station is kind of a memorial or a memory blackbox of an already demolished place.
Lucie Novácková’s installation No matter how hard you try I would never be the same as before is showing a moment of defragmentation, creating a beauty that in the same moment carries a moment of loss as substantial moment of a new creation. For this site specific installation she used the fragments from the work “Latency, black”, presented at Pragovka 2020 and what was hidden in the original installation, at lll becames the ground stone of the object, which works directly with the space of LLL, using the spacial circumstances as the basis for re- creating the installation, formerly drowned in black color.
The second part Divided Spaces – Visions takes part at DREAM ESTATE, former place of Notgalerie, in Seestadt. (www.dreamestate.at)
The exhibition takes on the moment started at the initial show at LLLLLL but starts to shift the moment of absence. In Martins installation the Lights begin to shine again in a new setting. Not anymore as light sources for the illumination of a workplace where goods are produced but as a representation of a fire place, a spot to gather around and to show the body of the absence, that is produced when past is not only information about something gone, but memory that can be carried and shared by each individual by telling it to others.
Lucie is using the same materials again as in the installation at LLLLLL but now placing them in a new object titled I COULD HAVE BEEN WITH YOU, BUT I AM LEAVING. In this object she uses 8000 fibres to create a common room that can be entered by people ascending the place.