Ondřej Horák

1.25 Intersecting Gallery (Paper)

Ondřej Horák – Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Abstract:

The Intersecting Gallery project focuses on a current phenomenon in the Czech gallery environment, the so-called educational gallery. It is a type of gallery space that offers a comprehensive dramaturgical, spatial, and organizational offer to visitors. It does not divide the gallery space into exhibition space and space for accompanying programs (studios), but connects it (physically, mentally) into a unifying whole. This type of gallery space solution has been appearing in our country gradually over the last five years. Its form is most significantly tested by the Atrium Gallery, which has implemented nine exhibition projects during this period. However, a similar approach can be traced in the approach taken in other gallery institutions or in the work of individual artists, whose work is also to be captured in the presentation. For five years, the Atrium Gallery has been a space focused on projects that aim to provoke discussion, open up current social issues, and offer alternative answers. The exhibitions do not end here on the day of their opening.

The aim of the gallery is not to exhibit artistic artefacts; the long-term program and goal of the gallery is to reduce the boundary between exhibiting authors and visitors. It is the way to make the topics comprehensible to all social, gender, and age groups (and to actively apply an equal and inclusive approach) while focusing on the educational dimension of the topic that the gallery has defined its active approach in recent years. The presentation is intended to capture and present the gallery’s exhibition projects, which offer various ways to actively participate in them and become part of them. Interactive exhibitions intentionally offer more complex problems in an understandable language, and we also include various experts, organizations, or institutions focusing on social or environmental topics in the dramaturgy of the exhibitions. Events for schools, professionals, and the general public and educational activities are a natural part of the program. The gallery creates an offer for the active involvement of all visitors. The representatives of the gallery are not afraid to think of the exhibition space as a place for constant and active dialogue; it should be an educational gallery in the broadest sense of the word. The interactive, communicative, and visual approach of the exhibition projects is adapted to this. Everyone can participate in the form of such a perceived space with their reactions or offers.