The exhibition displays art projects produced by authors that have cooperated with us over the past six years within the framework of the residency and gallery program CC Tobačna 001. The presented artists and creators explore the urban environment and translate their observations into works that tackle the notions architecture, city and territory. The city, its architecture and restricted areas, thus persist as a significant iconographic and conceptual source of contemporary art.

"Utopia / Dystopia: Architecture, City, Territory" unveils strategies that artists employ in dealing with urban architecture and range from investigating the construction process, researching architectural structures and materials to analysing the relationship between man and architecture, and space mapping. Some artists delve into the balance of power, which is manifest in thematising the boundary between the private and the public or in questioning the laws, rules and prohibitions – that which represents the dividing line between what is allowed and what is forbidden.

Others contemplate the European reality at a time marked by the removal of former “monuments” and border controls, but also a time in which boundaries still very much persist, with systematic control merely being moved to the external Schengen borders. Consequently, new divisions are being created that do not differ significantly from those in the past, as borders still imply inclusion on the one hand and exclusion on the other, through travel, residence, work permits, etc. In other words, borders continue to hinder integration and help maintain various kinds of subordination and dependency.

Reviving the dead archives of soil, which constitutes landscape and yet it does not, probing into the hidden realities of a post-industrial city, the history and the future of modernist concepts in the case of residential complexes and border architectures from the socialist period, persistent ignorance in regard to the omnipresent military or universal eye, as well as exploring a city split between two countries and a city that struggles with water shortages, while its principal source is encased in concrete, are merely some of the projects which reveal that utopia and dystopia are two sides of the same coin. The said concepts therefore interact in a relationship that is open to change – the more utopia is rendered impossible by reality, the more it becomes real, or rather utopian, until it ultimately transforms itself through reality into the opposite, dystopia.

Utopia / Dystopia: Architecture, City, Territory

"Utopia / Dystopia: Architecture, City, Territory" unveils strategies that artists employ in dealing with urban architecture and range from investigating the construction process, researching architectural structures and materials to analysing ...