Jiří Sozanský - 1984 – The Year of Orwell

AUTHORSHIP

Equal co-authorship: Jiří Sozanský

CLASSIFICATION

Classification: film/videoart

DATES

Date of creation: 1984

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Duration: 00:07:36
Sound: Sound

EXHIBITIONS, PUBLIC PRESENTATIONS

Compilation containing the work: Czech Performance Art: Film and Video 1956-1989, Edice VIDA 5, VVP AVU, 2015
Attachment included with work’s publication: booklet CZ + EN

NOTES AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Notes: Script, realization: Jiří Sozanský
Camera: Jaroslav Kučera
Editing: Jiří Brožek
Music: Mikoláš Chadima
Expert advisors: Evald Schorm, Josef Henke
Technical advisors: Jiří Borl, Miroslav Masák, Tomáš Novotný, Jakub Berdych
Performers: Eva Černá, Karel Vaněk, Jiří Sozanský and others
Digitized color and black-and-white 16mm film with sound

Adopted text on the work: The film shows the burnt-out interior of Prague’s Trade Fair Palace, which in the early 1980s was the site of several alternative exhibitions and installations. In 1983, after finishing his work in the north Bohemian town of Most, Jiří Sozanský made the acquaintance of architect Miroslav Masák, who (along with his colleagues from the SIAL architectural studio) was responsible for the building’s reconstruction. Masák invited Sozanský to visit the burnt-out building in order to discuss the various aspects of the building’s planned conversion into the home for the National Gallery’s collection of modern art. The silent space, located on a busy city street and hidden behind plastic sheeting, inspired Sozanský to create a project of an environmental nature. He used the building as a raw movie set for several parallel scenes that took on the form of staged performances (Surviving; Escapes; The Hunt; State, Party, Citizen; There and Back; Massacre; Human Pair). These explored the atmosphere of fear and anxiety experienced by people living in a repressive totalitarian society – not just in George Orwell’s 1984 (a samizdat edition of which was circulating in Prague at the time), but also as it was lived every day by the inhabitants of socialist Czechoslovakia. In the film’s opening scene, Sozanský himself appears in an existential boxer performance (Massacre). Although the film is more a movie than a documentation of performance art, Sozanský’s intermedia approach represents another important characteristic of the Czech art scene in the 1980s. Both before and after making the film, Sozanský created numerous drawings and oil paintings that, in his view, go with the film to form a complete whole. The performance was also documented through photographs. In 2014, an eponymous monograph about the project was published as part of the artist’s exhibition at the National Gallery in Prague.
Source of text: České akční umění: Filmy a videa 1956-1989, Edice VIDA 5, VVP AVU, 2015
Author of text: Pavlína Morganová, Terezie Nekvindová, Sláva Sobotovičová
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INFORMATION IN PARTNER DATABASES

Artlist #1: Record at Artlist