Alena Kotzmannová | Static drama
21/02/25–08/06/25

The Black Cube, a space for exploring the moving image in works by selected artists, presents Static Drama by photographer and visual artist Alena Kotzmannová. The exhibition features works from the collections of the Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Králové along with several of Kotzmannová’s other works.

With its movie theatre atmosphere, the compact, dark space of the Black Cube inspired me to combine several media in one exhibition: fragments from films, frozen moving images and photographs in motion. The interplay of memory, associations and a gradually building sense of tension is further underscored by visual references to the aesthetics of film noir.

End of the Film (2001) from the GMU collections thematically represents the relationship between still and moving images. Another piece, the video Home Cinema (2006), shows a series of production logos. As the viewers watch these short sequences (the kind that precede a feature film), they find themselves permanently anticipating a thrilling experience, except that the expected catharsis never comes.

These older works are brought together in the new series Static Drama (2025), which consists of several still photographs of lights in night-time exteriors and twilit interiors, set in motion by small and often difficult-to-decode shifts in the image. The screens showing these images are placed in front of the viewer in such a way that they partially obscure the view of Home Cinema. This creates a situation in which the public environment of the movie theatre overlaps with the more intimate experience of looking at photographs in an album or on a mobile phone.

The exhibition forces us to question the nature of the exhibition space and of the media that we are looking at. Are we in a cinema, or in the safety of our own home? Casually walking down a night-time street, or watching a never-ending horror movie? Sharing a space with someone else, or playing a game of hide-and-seek with our own fragmented attention, which encourages us to jump from image to image? Evoking associations, interweaving layers of memory and playing with ideas of what came before the image and what will happen next – these are some of the strategies I have applied to my investigation of the constantly changing role of the photographic image.

Text: Alena Kotzmannová

The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Statutory City of Hradec Králové.