Marek Pokorný: Who from where to where and who switches off whom

The curator and theoretician Marek Pokorný returned after a few years in Rome to the Czech Republic and became curator of the House of the Lords of Kunštát (dům pánů z Kunštátu) in Brno. A year later he left the position to become the director of the Moravian Gallery. Is this change a promise of new opportunities for contemporary art or the end of work well begun?

You started profiling Dům pánů z Kunštátu as a flexible institution with international contacts. Your candidacy to the post of the director of the Moravian gallery was a surprise.

There were two or three aspects at play. Firstly, it is personal ambition — I don’t want to deny that. On the other hand DpzK is a part of Dům umění and I worked there as an external curator. The cooperation with management was not bad, but you were never your own master. Because I was commuting from Prague and Rome, I didn’t have any control of the general operation, I wasn’t the focal point to which this was related. I didn’t see much possibility for any future. The third aspect is personal. I was coming back from Rome to the Czech Republic and I was looking for a new place on the scene. And suddenly it was a challenge to ask for a new position. That was the coincidence that lead me to thinking about trying the tender for the Moravian Gallery. At the end of last year when the first tender was announced some people asked me if I would want to try it. At that time I wasn’t thinking about it. The Moravian Gallery is the second most important cultural institution and it is attractive because not only does one have a big responsibility but there is also a whole row of opportunities for visual art on the level of the whole republic.

You will be an external employee of the DpzK. This could be considered as a conflict of interests in Brno…
For the moment it is technically unfeasible to separate them. This year’s program evolved largely on my suggestions so I will have some supervision until the end of the year. There are running cycles of supporting programs that I initiated, and I’m involved in many things. Not that I was the curator of all of the exhibitions; this year I actually have only one, and another big project, Jiří Kovanda, is being prepared by Vít Havránek, and I have to help him somehow. I will definitely close this chapter at the end of 2004. I don’t know how it is going to be with DpzK, I don’t know, there are a few variants. By now none of them seems to me very good, but this question is developing and it will remain within the jurisdiction of the Dům umění. The concept of external curator should, in my opinion, remain the same, so that DpzK doesn’t become a junkyard of less successful exhibitions. The international orientation — the cooperation with curators from other places for more sophisticated projects — should stay the same. For example, the video-basement is unique; it would be a pity if it ceased to exist.

You told me earlier that you would like to start a center for contemporary art in Brno.

In the future, I would like to open an efficient functional center of contemporary art with an orientation to art history and art theory “in cooperation with,” not “in,” the Moravian Gallery. Such a center doesn’t exist yet in our country, if we ignore what Soros did and what Jiří Ševčík is doing at AVU, but there is no academic basis. But how is it going to look in the future and where will the money come from, I don’t dare to foretell. It is not about funding from private sources, because it should primarily be an academic institution oriented on archiving, research and theory.

And your personal projects. Now you were asked to draw up an exhibition for the EXPO 2005 in Japan.
I was chosen from the curators in the tender in the end. The exhibition is provisionally called The Mirror of Nature, which I changed from the basic theme called The Wisdom of Nature, which I considered an unacceptable term, a word construct that seems to be a part of some cliché. It is empty rhetoric, until we give it some contextual meaning. Actually there is a question, what is nature in our Czech context, if we are surrounded by a cultural landscape, and how can we relate ourselves to such a landscape. A cultural landscape is not nature anymore; it is something behind it, under it, but it is not nature. I am interested in looking for ways to relate ourselves to something that is nearly unimaginable… A wisdom of nature — which can handle everything including man — is nonsense. That’s why I picked as a leitmotif the photo by Jana Kalinová, where she switches off the city by remote control, but it is not that clear who is switching whom… at issue is the level of the illusions.

01.01.2004