New Interfaces/Viktor Čech: Dance in the Minefield or Labyrinths of Choreopolitical Systems

You are cordially invited to the lecture of Viktor Čech

MEDIUM Gallery, Hviezdoslavovo nám. 18, Bratislava

The lecture will be held in Czech language.


To write down the dance moves, which is the original meaning of the word choreography, means besides that to transform them within an abstract record. For this aim serve various systems of dance notation that bring to the written-down performance of the movement a strict structure and order. In this sense in the case of the defining of the certain rythmical instructions on the space-time axis of the movement, there is not such difference between marching soldies in a parade or the workers in a factory, who are strictly subordinated to the structured work process on the production line. Choreographical structures, which accompany our lives, begin within the basic habits that are connected to our movements among other people. The length and the rhythm of our walk, the distance from another passers-by, subconsious rules how to avoid them etc. The control over the bodily situation, which is offered to us as to individual beings by these mechanisms, are naturally serving to the ruling over the whole social organisms. They become something that is fundamentally political in the life of the human society. This does not consider only how, within the framework of the modernist critique of the authoritative regimes and mass culture, the mobile „ornament of the masses“ was critiqued by Siegfried Kracauer, but it also considers the overall appearence of the choreographical mechanisms in the arts, culture and our everydayness, how this problematics is today sometimes dealt under the term „choreopolitics“.

This lecture will be focused on the field, where these phenomena became a part of the work of the visual artists, performers and choreographs, who reflect within the interdisciplinary field on these politics of the structures that control the human bodily movement in our society.

Viktor Čech is a curator, art critic and contemporary art theorist. He writes for various art magazines and his curatorial projects concern the topics of the corporeality, performativity and choreographical structures. He deals with these topics from the perspective of the art historian of the 20th century. He is a pedagogue at the Department of Art Education of the Pedagogical Faculty at the Charles University in Prague.

The lecture is a part of the New Interfaces series, which is dramaturgically covered by the head of the MEDIUM Gallery, Miroslava Urbanová. The New Interfaces are a series of interdisciplinary lectures led by experts in various fields - literature, psychology, social sciences, aesthetics and game theory and art. They deal with topics that resonate in the work of the youngest artists working within the post-media environment. The cycle will focus primarily on topics related to our cognitive conditions in the interfaces of constantly evolving technologies and in contrast to the desire for authentic, visceral experience escaping out here-and-now. These themes appear in art with increasing urgency, both in the overproduction of performative works or works thematizing these new interfaces. The lectures also reflect the themes that appear in the dramaturgy of the exhibition plan of the MEDIUM gallery and its reading club for students What´s the Point?

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.