Reflect What You Are
I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you’re home
-Velvet Underground
The theme for the April 2019 New Bohemia Exhibition Series was Reflect What You Are. At a point in time when being visible and having a voice is paramount, we invited artists whose work asserts strongly who they are and/or what they stand for. The assertion of self through the process of creation and expression is a courageous affirmation of being that reverberates throughout communities and creates both identification and change. It challenges intolerance. Particularly encouraged was work that has a strong, international social justice component, deals with issues of gender, identity, or notions of self, or deals with marginalization or oppression.
Exhibiting artists are:
Massima Desire
Lyubomir Ignatov
Bára Kopečná
Kristián Németh
Hana Shannon
Patricia Voulgaris
On view April 4 – May 23, 2019
“A person has to show courage in order to answer to the open call called Reflect What You Are. Self-reflection is never easy and it is even harder now when the notion of identity is growing and offers a wide range of definitions. Not only do the featured artists show their personal preferences, but they also reflect the stance of the society towards the changes in the approach to identity that are happening now all over the world. The old conventions are breaking apart and new terms and preferences are being created. The works of these artists correlate with the process of the deep social changes and they try to find the answers to a great number of new questions.”
– Charlotta Kotik, Curator Emerita of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
Exhibiting artist have been selected through an Open Call by the New Bohemia jury comprising Charlotta Kotik, Marie Tomanová, Thomas Beachdel, Jan Žahour, Barbora Bartůňková and Marie Dvořáková.
NEW BOHEMIA JURY MEMBERS – 2019
Charlotta Kotik
Charlotta Kotik is a Curator Emerita of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum and an independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Prague, she was a curator at the Albright Knox art Gallery, Buffalo, NY and later at the Brooklyn Museum. She organized over 100 exhibitions and was an American commissioner for Venice Biennale where she presented work of Louise Bourgeois. She also lectures at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her most recent project was the exhibition at Robert Henry Contemporary presenting Remy Jungerman: Based In.
Barbora Bartůňková
Barbora Bartůňková is a PhD Candidate in the History of Art Department at Yale University, where she has worked on modern and contemporary art, photography, and film. She is currently a Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Barbora holds an M.A. in the History of Art with Distinction from University College London, where she also received her B.A. in French with Film Studies. She has held curatorial and museum positions in numerous institutions, including the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Lobkowicz Collections, Prague, and the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.
Marie Dvořáková
Marie is a graduate of Prague Film School, FAMU. Following that, she pursued her Master’s Degree in Film Directing at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her narrative/documentary short films were screened and have received awards at different film festivals worldwide.
In addition, Marie is the recipient of the 16th Annual Student Filmmaker Award by the Director’s Guild of America. She is also the 2011 Spike Lee Production Fund Award recipient and the 2010 Sloan Film Production Grant recipient as well as the Jerome Foundation production grant recipient. Her work was shortlisted at the AICP Show in New York and at the Cannes 2010 Young Directors Award Show. She was awarded the World Bronze Medal at the 2010 International Advertising Awards in Shanghai, as well as 1st Prize at the 2010 Porsche Awards in Germany.
Her short film Who’s Who in Mycology received Student Academy Award and screened at Telluride Film Festival, Palm Spring Int. ShortFest, Karlovy Vary Int. Film Festival, Fantasia Film Festival and many others. Marie’s currently filming a documentary series about young breakthrough artists living in New York City.
Marie Tomanova
Marie Tomanova is a visual artist living and working in New York City. Through photography, video, installation and performance, her work focuses on the nature of identity, gender, immigration and displacement. Her first monograph Young American will be published by Paradigm Publishing in spring 2019. A documentary following Marie’s journey is in making by Academy Award (student) winning director Marie Dvořáková and will be released in 2019.
Exhibition include SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NYC), A.I.R. Gallery (NYC), Museum Of Sex (NYC), Czech Center New York (NYC), Pragovka Gallery (ČR), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (PA), among others. She curated Youth Explosion: The New Bohemia (2016) and co-curated Baby, I Like It Raw: Post-Eastern Bloc Photography and Video (2017), and MUSE MUSE exhibitions for Czech Center New York.
Thomas Beachdel, PhD
Thomas Beachdel is an art and architectural historian whose work focuses on landscape aesthetics/ideologies between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the formation of political and scientific thought and in the relationship between human and environment in the Anthropocene. Emphasizing the notion of the hybrid as a methodological approach, his interdisciplinary research interests cross chronological and geographic boundaries to focus on the relationship between aesthetics and scientific inquiry.
An Assistant Professor in History of Art and Architecture and the Humanities at City University of New York, Hostos, he has lectured at the Dahesh Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the New Museum, the Whitney, DIA Beacon, and at contemporary New York galleries. He has taught courses on art and architectural history at Hunter College, The Pratt Institute, Parsons The New School for Design, and at Spitzer School of Architecture (City College).
Jan Žahour
Acting director of Czech Center New York.
