Antonín Kindl: SYNAPSE

Where?

• Galéria 19,

  • Lazaretská 2402/19, 811 08 Bratislava

When?

• Opening: January 18, 2024, at 7 p. m.

• Exhibition duration: till February 16, 2024

 

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Author:

• Antonín Kindl, MA student in study program Design in Studio Multimedia

Curator:

• Martin Derner

Curatorial text for the exhibition

Antonín Kindl is a student of the MediaLab* studio at the AFAD with Ján Šicko. He works with new media and installations at the intersection of technology and art. He is interested in how technology affects our relationship with the world and tries to refute its conventional use. The installations he creates are living, interactive organisms that invite viewers to actively participate. He intensively researches perception processes and creates his own perceptual systems. In his work, technology changes from a mere tool to a companion in the exploration of new forms of expression and experience.

The exhibition concept of Gallery 19, teacher - student, assumes a direct connection between the exhibiting author and the teacher. I took the liberty of bypassing this concept and approached student Antonín Kindl from the Department of Visual Communication, who is a student at the Multimedia Studio, MediaLab* under the guidance of doc. Ján Šicko. This studio is a place that significantly expands students' perception of graphic design through new technologies and new media. I mention this also because I personally see this studio as progress within the study offer not only at the AFAD, and I am pleased that the result of student research from the environment of applied art reaches the environment of liberal arts.

Antonín Kindl gradually worked his way from the standard perception of graphic design to contemporary artistic expression, which was undoubtedly helped by the fact that he found himself in the MediaLab* studio, which naturally navigated him towards experimental forms of "visual communication". Fascination with technology in connection with his, in the good sense of the word, "do-it-yourself nature" becomes his gateway to the world of art and new media.

He is still only a beginning author and his interactive work Synapse, this interactive electro-organism, which we can see and experience for the first time in the gallery space, is his exhibition debut. Kindle's enthusiasm for technology and various works in the form of student experiments are slowly moving him from technological tests or techno-exhibitions to the level of an author's statement in his latest works. The exhibited interactive object Synapse was preceded by several other similar works, and one of them is the installation Receptor, which, like Synapse, deals with perception, or, to quote the author, "investigates the issue of the incompleteness of knowledge and the process of perception." Perception becomes a supporting idea for Kindl, and since it is a very broad, overarching term, it is not excluded that it can also become his lifelong theme. Dividing art according to medium is undoubtedly an anachronism, but it is precisely this studio thinking of his that caught my attention and what I perceive as his possible emergence from the space of applied art into the world of free art, into the space of author's work.

I think that finding one's topic is a cornerstone in the search for one's direction, and which can move it, but above all, free oneself in creation, step out on one's own path, unfettered by a medium or belonging to a certain sphere of art.

Despite his young age, in the works of Antonín Kindl, in addition to the aforementioned, the high quality of the realization of his works and his technological skill appeal to me. Which at the same time underlines my opinion that in art it is not age that decides, but the time we dedicate to the problem.

Martin Derner, January 2024

 

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