Prague. Now tranzit Prague has moved into impressive quarters in the inner city of Prague: 300m2 of »white cube« in the basement of a former dance studio in a 1930s building. Not posh and smooth, but a place that fosters engagement and creativity. Vit Havranek, the head of tranzit Prague, has set up this location together with David Kulhanek, one of the co-founders of the Display Gallery, with both names being fused to become »Tranzitdisplay«. Havranek’s programme for tranzit, a network that is supported financially by the Erste Bank group, yet is independent both in structure and its planning decisions, has been characterised for years by a conceptual/post-conceptual approach and intensive discourse and engagement with socio-political themes within the field of art.
The opening exhibition featured the Mexican artist Erick Beltrán (born 1974), who has forged close ties with Europe over the past few years through his activities. Beltrán did part of his training in Paris and Amsterdam. For some time now, Beltrán has been interested in media production, among other things organising a number of print workshops, most recently together with Ana Paula Cohen in São Paulo. His largest newspaper project, »Ergo Sum«, 320 pages long, is a work-in-process project that reveals further facets in Prague. The pages of the newspaper are attached to a large-scale black, elliptical wall figure, like a Chinese wall newspaper. »Ergo Sum« – the title is an allusion to René Descartes’ »Discourse on the Method« – is a multi-layered publication in the format of a daily newspaper containing various types of text and image focusing on abstract models and analytical concepts as well as scientific images and structures: formulae and statistical graphs, typographies and typologies, typefaces and secret codes, and games and media formats, which are re- and decontextualised, reflected in each other and set apart from one another by references to various historical periods. »Pure« prevailing paradigms stand next to and in relation with impure, para-scientific paradigms. The topics range from an extensive analysis of the concept of discourse (¿Qué es el discurso?) to parapsychology, psychokinesis, ideology, religion, form and surface, energetics, dynamics and coincidences. On the front page of the first issue is the headline »La Maduración de Ostwald«, a homage to the Russian-German philosopher and scientist – whose colour primer provided an important basis for the Bauhaus –, who was also the president of the organisation »Die Brücke – Insitute for the Organisation of Creative Work«, in which he wanted to catalogue and organise all the known knowledge up to then. The archivist Beltrán likes such encyclopaedic projects and obscure models for explaining the world – at the interfaces between science and hybrid hypertrophic systematisations –, following the traces of both and adding new narratives. With scientific seriousness, Beltrán carries out studies to decode the images of consumption and capitalism and to uncover the nature of ideological contexts and strategies, setting great store by the creation of new interpretative spaces between and in the territories. At the end of the first issue, an abstract, coherent system of references shows the complex thematic connections in diagrams. After this immensely tightly packed presentation, which requires many mental acrobatics from the audience, the reading room allows the visitors in Prague to sit and enjoy an extended edition in Czech that also refers to the local context.
The presentation in the second room of the exhibition at Tranzitdisplay is made captivating by a visual encyclopaedia of models and signs that are sketched in black on white – white background, white ceiling and white floor. The radiantly white cube seems like one surface and the visitors are the vectors between the geometric figures of triangles, concentric circles and Platonic bodies and diagrams, which create the connections.
Beltrán is not only good at giving visual form to different ideas, thoughts, relationships and process, but also an obsessive educator. He had already proved his enthusiasm in numerous workshops, and also showed his stamina a day after the opening in Prague with his eight-hour conference »The Eel Soup«, held together with the graphic designer Eduardo Barrera. The way these two men set in motion questions about the machinery of discourse and did not tire of outlining and expounding the network of global symbols and patterns – here, Beltrán reinforced his own world model, the »Maduración de Ostwald« – provided an exemplary first demonstration of, and commentary on, tranzit’s intentions to develop experimental forms of artistic discourse at the Display in Prague.
Translated by Timothy Jones