Photoreport: A night when Lehkost was alive
Lehkost (Lightness) is the luminous installation by the conceptual artist Aliona Solomadina and also the fourth piece within the site-specific art series by Kunsthalle Praha called Facade Project. Lehkost is the luminous installation by the conceptual artist Aliona Solomadina and also the fourth piece within the site-specific art series by Kunsthalle Praha called Facade Project
Facade Project
Aliona Solomadina
Lightness
Solomadina works at the intersection of typography and conceptual art. And one of her key sources of inspiration is architecture. In her native Kyiv, she started developing the City Of Forms project, which consists on investigating the city's architecture and urban life in a variety of ways: guided by Google Maps, taking notes, making photography. She examines every detail and lets herself moved by her surroundings. This is how she captures shapes and then interprets and converts them into letterforms. This is exactly how Lehkost, a piece of art influenced by the brutalist architecture of Karel Prager and Milan Kundera‘s famous novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was created.
The light installation Lehkost was created in Prague in 2019 during the residency program organized by the Ukraine Institute with the support of Kunsthalle Praha.
Lightness live: Introduction of the installation
5. 2. 2020
An evening gathering with conceptual artist Aliona Solomadina, who introduced her light installation Lehkost. The head curator of Kunsthalle Praha, Christelle Havranek, took the opening speech and the experimental electronica soundtrack of the evening was provided by Daria Veshtak aka Sirakusy.
Audiovisual performance in club Swim
5. 2. 2020
An unrepeatable performance of Ukrainian tandem Sirakusy + Goldenilustra and Czech eclectic duo Citty & Aeldryn presented the audio-visual possibilities of the City of Forms project. The event with the sounds of a dark ambient and hypnotic techno was created in collaboration with Lunchmeat Festival.
Photo © Filip Kopecký
FACADE PROJECT
Kunsthalle Praha presents a series of site-specific projects to be temporarily displayed on its facade, the only part of the building accessible to the public during the renovation.
Under the title Facade Project, this programme of commissioned outdoor artwork refers to the history of the building. The Zenger transformer substation’s facade was originally intended to exhibit a light-kinetic sculpture series by the avant-garde sculptor Zdeněk Pešánek. Sadly, this project, entitled One Hundred Years of Electricity, was never executed.
Paying tribute to Zdeněk Pešánek’s vision, Facade Project works as an experimental platform allowing artists to create installations using various media at the intersection of art and technology. Each step of the building’s transformation is accompanied by a specific artwork in dialogue with the architecture of the Zenger transformer substation and the surrounding neighbourhood. All the interventions are research-based, questioning the multi-layered context – geographical, political, social – of a place situated in the very heart of Prague.
Aside from stimulating the curiosity of the public, Facade Project functions as a laboratory that hints at Kunsthalle Praha’s indoor program to be presented from 2021.
