Tomorrow starts yesterday

At the core of the DOX Fall Season, three exhibitions mark 20 years since the collapse of the communist regime and address the present-day moral and political crisis people face in the Czech Republic. The exhibits raise the question how much the ruling generation and its mentality inherited from the communist past are responsible for the current predicament of the Czech Republic. 

It is evident that we can no longer afford to assist the ongoing crisis by being mere spectators. After twenty years, the moment has come when citizens, especially the youngest among us, should remind politicians: We are not children!
The exhibition “Tommorow starts yesterday”(7 October - 23 November) compares the past and contemporary methods of persuasion on the example of political advertising, electioneering of the existing political parties and commercial advertising. The exhibition confronts history and the present using two monumental video installations. The first is the propagandistic movie from the 1950s about a military parade on Letenská pláň. The second video installation is the closing scene of the documentary Czech Dream about a fictitious supermarket. An important part of the exhibition consists of works by artists of the youngest generation, who have created installations inspired by political slogans. On show will be works of the artistic group Pode Bal, which pays attention to the relationship between commercial and political marketing from the point of view of Czech history.

The StB Registry of Persons of Interest   installation (the acronym StB stands for Státní bezpečnost, the former State Secret Police) presents the divisive topic of access to the archives of the Communist Secret Police by using devices of contemporary art. It also draws attention to the increasingly ubiquitous phenomenon of surveillance. The exhibition runs from November 12, 2009 through the end of February 2010.

The exhibition On the Road Together:  The Union of Artists Projects in the Period of ‘Normalization’presents posters and catalogs published by the official Union of Artists in the 1970s and 1980s, i.e., the late years of the Communist regime.