Late Intimacy

Late Intimacy
05/06/21–29/08/21

curator: Jiří Ptáček | Space
Pavel Baňka, Veronika Šrek Bromová, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Markéta Othová, Rudolf Samohejl, Lucia Sceranková, Tomáš Svoboda, Aleksandra Vajd, Lenka Glisníková & Karolína Matušková

For most of us, intimacy is the most distant corner and deepest content of our private lives. In communication, it is facilitated by the highest form of trust. The prickly Latin word intimus means the “most secret” and “most inner” as well as “most intimate”. It is an important issue of our historical and cultural condition that these most hidden, most intimately relayed, truths are the main focal point of artistic expression.

The exhibition Late Intimacy (Pozdní intimita) is a reaction to the pressure we all face to share our private lives. This pressure is present not only in mass media but also on social networks, which are programmed to leverage our need for acceptance and reward, and are present as both overt and covert documenters and analyzers of our behavior in both the physical and digital space. We are also increasingly aware that the main goal of this pressure is to gather information which can be monetized or used to gain power. This is why the importance of how responsibly art handles privacy and intimacy has become more urgent.

The central goal of the exhibition is to explore the range of strategies which contemporary photographers use in portraying relationships and intimacy. Their approaches reflect the delicacy of the subject which they have decided to focus on, and the exhibition itself follows the space between intentional lack of literalness, careful strides, metaphors, and respect for that which is hidden and incapable of being fully known.