It is not easy to find or at least to presage some general topics or trends in contemporary living art. Nonetheless, it is part of a curator´s work to “make small advances” to history of art and to help it crystallize new contents. Likewise, it is one of the duties of SNG to present contemporary art. However, it should not be presentation which is careless – for we are not a kunsthalle, but such which is somehow shaped and symptomatic, such which does not perplex or muddy the already murky chaos of live production and operation, such which at least tentatively clears and evaluates. This is what I am attempting at in this curator, basically thematic exhibition of contemporary art delete: to somehow better mediate what I would denote an absolving principle and what I register as a particular trend both of a certain life-style alternative and an occasional artistic strategy throughout the art of the past two-three decades.
In times of overpressure, cumulation, stratification and cluttering up (hardware) of the world not only by things, but redundant ideas and information, as if subliminally there was outlining a contrary principle – a need to de-fragmentise, “clean” the cultural disc and resist the over-production and abnormal information load in the Zen manner. Thus, in the perceptual environment of the present day, increasingly and even more urgently there appear various strategies of boxing, bracketing, erasing or disconnecting from the indigestible, too intrusive and stressful reality.
Although majority of creative artistic gestures usually arise through adding, i.e. leaving a track in the world, we are going to be interested in works and approaches which are contrasting, and not only in sense of classical minimalism or concept (hence, in sense of dematerialisation as process of creation), but in sense of a topic as well.
The aim of our exhibition is to concentrate and structure more meaningfully the works and contributions of authors who use gestures or procedures of liberation, clearing, absolving, elimination, reduction, erasing and separating, whitening or bleaching, “acidizing”, dissection, censoring and self-censorship, purposeful/programme absence, withdrawal, disappearance or vanishing, and who produce works created by evanescence, loss, abandonment, oblivion, or forgetting...
The term delete, which could seem narrowly defined at first sight, should be developed by the exhibition as much as possible. It should not tend to only one, let´s say metaphysical vanishing point, but show the iconographic richness and also a certain heterogeneity of this gesture, a universal bewitchment and “projectiveness” of an empty (whitened or blackened) area.