Imagine that you decide to go to an exhibition, a decision which in itself entails a certain willingness, responsiveness and openness.

Upon entering the Fotograf Gallery you’re surprised by the relatively communicative atmosphere, you are welcomed and invited to come in.

The room is small, and appears to be divided in half by a cloth partition. From the other side of the partition, a voice asks you to draw a study of your hand.

If you agree and accept the challenge, through an opening in the partition, you are handed paper, pencils and eraser.

Drawing is not as common a form of expression as speaking, and one might say it has its own rules. For someone who doesn’t draw, that person must try to figure out the logic of the rules anew.

And what then if the person is someone who does draw? Does everything end with the drawing itself, or is there some universal art talent that can also be applied in other activities?

Can it relate to a way of thinking?

If the hand on the paper is a fair likeness of your own, which was the model, you hand the drawing back to the gallery’s backstage area, and let someone there assess the likeness.

The second room is bigger, lighter and feels more like an exhibition than the first. There are photographs on the walls in which the sound you hear in your headphones is anchored.

The third room is empty, with just a dividing partition running through it like in the others before it. It only has chairs.

You take a couple of steps and intuit the presence of someone else on the other side of the partition of nontransparent fabric. After a moment of uncertainty, the person greets you and invites you to take a seat.

You continue in a several-minute long dialogue, during which you move through space and time, which you enter a realm of imagining together with the someone on the other side of the partition. What you do in that imaginary space is not reality, but it is a real experience.

Again, imagination is not something commonly practiced in adulthood. To know how to imagine a change or something new, however, provides alternatives to experienced reality.

In the last room there hangs a single photograph.

You come closer and recognize your own hand and your own drawing of your hand next to each other. Photographed and framed. In the end, you gaze upon what you yourself have created, with contemplation and a measure of distance.

The motif of the exhibition was to make visible the social processes influencing whether the artist (so-called) professionally breaks through or not.

A common dictionary for describing whether an artist is recognized is described as a sharp break from one position of being to another. Situation similar to when two galleries excavated from two sides finally merge into one tunnel. Celebration of successful efforts and excellent planning.

In the case of artistic success, however, it is in fact more of a complicated journey, accompanied by permanent doubts and the effort to maintain independence.

The Break Through (Průraz) exhibition is a continuation of artistic research dealing with the phenomenon of art school graduates who, after their studies, began to engage in another non-artistic jobs.

The research is based on the testimonies of several dozen respondents, of which a selected part participated in a series of workshops directly in the Entrance Gallery during the exhibition.

The exhibition thus had an essential procedural and participatory aspect.

The wall served as a conceptual model at this exhibition - a sieve on which something could settle and something else passed through it. The wall with elevated lithographic stones functioned as a border between the space in front of and behind.

When we imagined what forces person to work (to devote herself to artistic work) and if this force passed through a semi-permeable wall to the other side.

Or on the contrary, what does the opposite force look like, a dampening force that causes negativity, bitterness?

The drawings I asked invited art school gaduates for were created in response to my question whether it is possible to express by drawing what one can take from one's art education if one eventually worked in another field and what, on the contrary, had to suppress oneself from art education.

The motifs in the drawings are very difficult to analyze in terms of meaning; it has become much more evident that it is not very easy to express oneself spontaneously after years of artistic inactivity. Rather, the drawings showed the last vivid artistic idea evoked by this situation.

It seemed to be a very important motif for a particular artist, and it was also often related to time when it was necessary to address issues like: what to do after finishing art school, making living, having a family.

Basically, depending on the extent to which it was possible to spontaneously involve the artistic imagination showed how necessary it was to suppress artistic nature in the lives of AVU graduates and how difficult or sometimes impossible it is to recall it.

"I used to be a shy, private person but my graphics have always been violent and rough. Those tools urged me to make it so. Graphics made me tougher and gave me a clear impulse to assert myself. To break through as an artist..."

The exhibition is a backdrop against which three “Blind Panels” took place according to the Biographical-Narrative Interpretation Method (BNIM).

It was an interpretational process with approximately five to seven panelists around the table. The text we worked with was one of the interviews I conducted for this thesis.

This involved the account, or life story, of a person who graduated from the Academy of Arts (AVU) in Fine Art.

The interpretation brought to light the blind spots in the narrative, even though the panelists couldn’t see into the future. They did not know the material they were working with.

The only thing the invited panelists knew was that we would be discussing in a group the narrative of an anonymous person.

An audio recording of the interview was transcribed and read, step by step, without knowledge of what would come next, how the telling would evolve.

After each sequence of text reading, a hypothesis of experience was worked out. A hypothesis of what that person is experiencing at that moment while speaking about his or her life. And then, after writing out approximately five speculative hypotheses, approximately five paths of possible narrative continuation were worked out for each one.

For example: if this person is experiencing a sense of equilibrium when talking about this event, what will he talk about next? Or if he is disappointed, how will he/she continue, what will happen next?

In the process of gradual assumptions and predictions, the imagined experience was modified and refined.

For myself, this blind panel helped me to see connections that I would not have noticed or would not have even considered previously.

The exhibition took place on the grounds of the Academy, which opened the platform for discussion of what the school gave to our lives, what we’re expecting and what we’ll experience after school if we don’t immediately find a gallerist, have exhibitions and so on.

A metaphor for the visualization of the subject was the environment of artistic print-making. The space was dominated by a strip of linoleum for linocut prints on a natural corkboard base. Other elements were using engraving tools, and an allegory of cutting tools for linocut present as details of the chair and table legs.

Everything that was talked about in the exhibition was gradually written down on the linoleum, and then engraved into its surface.

The exhibition therefore did not represent “research”, or the accounts given by the graduates, as a closed issue, but rather served to make the process, and how to analyze phenomena rising to the surface, more visible.

What then arose from the analysis of three accounts?

In general, the depression empowered by the described nuances of the feeling of failure remained in the room, on the surface of the linoleum, like wrinkles on an old face. The weight of the panelists who listened to accounts was then transferred in a new layer onto the linoleum in the form of deep pressure marks and long scratches.

The Projection

Three videos were projected onto a sheet of paper which the viewer held in their hand.

I asked three different Academy graduates who had graduated in fine art, but all their lives they’d made their living from the restoration of works of art, to take me to one place where they had done restoration work. I then asked them to go back to the time when they had been restoring this particular artwork, and try to reconstruct everything the process involved.

In agreement with them, a pantomime reconstruction of the workflow was created. On the projection, we see their hands working. The restoration tools are imaginary.

I wondered at what point this request would become something they would take as their means of returning to the time they restored the work, and what this experience would bring.

“Resignation Through Restoration” - An audio recording in headphones.

The fundamental motif of the audio-text is the consideration: with the passage of time and subjection to outside pressures, many graduates of the fine art studio gradually became restorers.

What effect did restoring have on their ambition to build a stable position and achieve recognition for themselves as fine artists.