Exhibition
just opened
United Visual Artists: Strange Attractions
10 Oct 2024 – 10 Jan 2025
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 19:00
- Friday
- 11:00 – 19:00
- Saturday
- 11:00 – 19:00
- Sunday
- 11:00 – 19:00
- Monday
- 11:00 – 19:00
- Wednesday
- 11:00 – 21:00
Address
- Klárov 5
- Prague
Prague - 118 00
- Czechia
Travel Information
- We are located near the Malostranská public transport stop. You can easily reach us by metro or tram. Then all you have to do is head north to the Old Castle Stairs and cross Pod Bruskou Street.
The exhibition Strange Attractions, realized in cooperation with Signal Festival and Kunsthalle Praha, presents the current work of the legendary British studio UVA – United Visual Artists.
About
About the project
The exhibition project highlights the parallels between the unpredictability of chaos theory and the structured patterns that emerge from it. By examining the nuanced boundary between order and chaos, the exhibition reflects on how these principles manifest across nature, artistic processes, and societal structures, encouraging viewers to contemplate the complex dynamics shaping our environment.The works presented invite viewers to consider how initial conditions and underlying dynamics shape the increasing urgency of phenomena in our environment, offering a deeper understanding of the intricate beauty of chaotic systems.
The exhibition's centrepiece is a kinetic horizontal double pendulum, enhanced by projectors illuminating the gallery walls. The pendulum's movements are translated in real-time into data, driving dynamic projections that connect physical and digital realities. This synthesis of order and chaos seamlessly blends the tangible with the intangible, the visible with the invisible, offering an experience that unfolds through time and motion. Both pendulum rotations are converted in real time into data that is used to control the dynamic projections. The synthesis of order and chaos thus occurs in an instant, combining the tangible with the intangible, the seen with the unseen, and offering an experience that can only be understood through the unfolding of movement and time.
The exhibition presents three further works from UVA: Present Shock, Etymologies, and Serendipity, which develop the dynamic themes of order and chaos at the levels of language, social and economic phenomena, and space-time theories.
About the artists
United Visual Artists (UVA) is a London-based studio founded in 2003 by British artist Matt Clark. UVA's diverse body of work integrates new technologies with traditional media such as sculpture, performance and site-specific installations. Drawing on sources ranging from ancient philosophy to theoretical science, they explore the cultural frameworks and natural phenomena that shape our knowledge, creating tools that manipulate our perceptions and reveal the relativity of our experience. Rather than material objects, UVA’s works are better understood as events in time in which the performance of light, sound, and movement unfolds.
UVA have been represented in major gallery institutions including the Barbican Curve Gallery, London; the Royal Academy of Arts; the Serpentine Gallery, London; The Wellcome Trust; the Victoria & Albert Museum; YCAM, Tokyo, Japan and the Sydney Biennale. UVA’s studio collaborates with a variety of professionals beyond the visual arts. Collaborations span many disciplines and personalities including choreographers Animals of Distinction, Benjamin Millepied and the Paris Opéra Ballet, filmmaker Adam Curtis, musicians Massive Attack, Battles, James Blake, Ben Frost.
