A rediscovery in Conceptual art.
This book is the first complete edition of the actions, installations and interventions (1976-2005) of Jirí Kovanda. The design of the book replicates the A4 pages, with photographs and typewritten texts attached, which the artist used in the 1970s and 1980s as his exhibition documentation.
Kovanda's ephemeral activities in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the discovery of new types of relationships, which the artist adopted with his friends as well as with anonymous passers-by in the streets. Kovanda's interventions and installations from the 1980s constitute ironic reactions to American Minimalism. The artist ‘installed' them in peripheral locations of the public space during the period of so-called "real socialism." The book treats Kovanda's performance-intervention work up to 2005.
Along with the complete documentation, there is an attempt to situate, in a discursive manner, Kovanda's work in the history of conceptualism. The book includes three interviews:
Hans Ulrich Obrist's interview with Jirí Kovanda; the Czech theorist and art historian Jirí Sevcík's interview with the editor-in-chief of the magazine "Springerin" Georg Schöllhamer; and Vít Havránek's epistolary interviews with Pawel Polit and
Igor Zabel.
First volume of the series "Tranzit," edited by Vít Havránek, focusing on Central and Eastern Europe artists.
Jirí Kovanda (born 1953 in Prague) is a key figure of the “discreet
happening”. In the political context of the Prague of the 1970s, he made some striking interventions, as much for their provocative aspect as for their sobriety.
