The exhibition of three authors and three curators (Jakub Frank, Barbora Kundračíková and Martina Mertová) is tied not only to the objectives of the first year of the Trienále SEFO, which examines and verifies the possibilities of our relationship with and thinking about the world but also indirectly responds to the main theme of Olomouc Ecological Days 2020 – it puts forward an argument within an argument, asking: If ecology and our relationship with nature is one of the main topics of the day; if, at the same time, attention is naturally focused on only a few dominant areas such as water scarcity and global warming, how do we deal with those topics, perhaps marginal in nature, that are too fragile for normal perception? And what about our personal experience with today’s landscape? Maria Štefanová, Šimon Brejcha and Michal Kindernay share an interest in ephemeral, inconspicuous but constantly recurring phenomena. In their work, they mirror and refine each other, but in some moments they also deny - they function and act as autonomous entities endowed with their own identity independent of the human one. Whether it is the imprint of a branch, the recording of sound or the mapping of past events, man is its recipient, albeit active, not the originator. It is almost to be said that Kant after Duchamp, Kant in the post-conceptual period, may be passé - Kant after the Anthropocene, in a world that is no longer only or mainly human, but is gaining in interest.

In the figures of the Seekers, Slovak artist Štefan Oslej takes command of the principles of combinatorial mathematics, applying them to a metaphorical genetic code, thus embodying the paradox of the partly objectifying, partly deeply individualised identity of man. Oslej elaborates the figures of his Seekers both as drawings and especially in three-dimensional form. While it may initially seem that this is an anonymous and uniform set of a single type, each hand-cast bust bears its own graphic and numerical code.
In addition to the search for individuality, the exhibition focuses on the anatomical essence of the individual. This is the main subject of the work of self-taught artist Luboš Plný, who has had a long-term interest in anatomy. He has taken part in many autopsies and even subjected his own body to numerous experiments and examinations. Based on the study of medical atlases, especially after the operation he underwent, he began to create anatomical self-portraits that record in detail the systems of organs, bones, muscles, and veins supplemented with Latin names or texts describing events that occurred during the drawing process. His own system of recording corporeality is an original contribution not only to non-professional art.
Hungarian photographer József Hajdú also works with the internal anatomy of the human body, using and modifying X-ray images from the 1930s. Naturally, their original function is a thing of the past, and the same can be said of their later surprising adaptation into a material for the production of gramophone records. Skeletal systems and spiral grooves with a soundtrack are nevertheless two layers to which Hajdů adds a third – the photographic, thus achieving new semantic connections between the principles of scientific image, music and visual culture. By layering meaning and function, he also accentuates the variability and transience of existence. 
This subject, in connection with human existence and the paradoxical association of its beginning and end, is embraced by young Czech sculptor Tea Smetanová. The Canopic Jar cycle directly refers to traditional ancient Egyptian mummification practices involving the use of these vessels to store internal organs. Egyptian canopic jars took the form of gods, whereas Tea has imprinted them with the features of a newborn child. As such, the group of nine formally identical sculptures, each made of a different material, simply reflects the cyclical nature of life.
These approaches and ways of examining human existence have a parallel in one of the exceptional documents of period knowledge, i.e., the obstetric atlas from 1758 with anatomically precise illustrations by William Smellie (1697–1763), a Scottish physician and obstetrician who worked in London. The drawings are the work of Johannes Michael Seligmann (1720–1762), a Nuremberg engraver known primarily for his work on botanical and ornithological atlases. The high-quality scientific illustrations capture – in a seemingly similar yet substantially different way – the internal world of the human body, just like today’s ultrasound and X-ray images. 
The Human Records exhibition therefore presents different ways of perceiving human existence, the identity of the individual and actual anatomy of the body. It presents man as a “universum” that is dealt with not only by exact science, but also the fine arts, with these two seemingly different approaches overlapping in an inventive and enriching way.

The world in which we lived was measured out in the 18th century. In the middle of that century, the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten called aesthetics “the doorway to the midday light of rationality”. David Hume introduced the basic human paradox, the opposition of the personal and the general. And Immanuel Kant showed the limits of human reason, and thanks to him, we all have the right to beauty and truth. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder to agree on what this means. And yet, it all starts with the body, our own senses and the experience they convey to us. A giant abyss separates that which is and what we consider as such. Who decides what is right? Who bears responsibility for such a decision? Why does our world look like it does and not like something else? We could classify rocks not by their chemical composition but by their colour. Instead of describing types, we could describe individual specimens. We can also imagine worlds and universes other than ours, or we could try to follow a different system of the time. Why not? The power of imagination is enormous, the possibilities of classification infinite. As the British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose also tries to show, it is quite possible that the cosmos itself is cyclical and without memory, that it not only shrinks and expands, but also breaks apart, and that what we consider its origin, the big bang, could be only one of many to have occurred. 
Let's assume that the universe is cyclical - such is its exposition. At its beginning as well as the end, it is a structure. Uršula Berlot-Pompe, Zdeněk Trs, Jaroslav Grulkowski and even Lubomír Axmann represent the seeming transparency of a logical system, the technically accurate visualisations of its structure. While it would be convenient to understand chaos as its direct opposite, far more subversive are marginal positions or pseudo-systems that use credible mechanisms and established strategies, slightly misinterpreted to make them more pliable. But the more we bend the idealised objective system to our needs and possibilities, the more we betray it. Examples of this subtle yet fundamental shift are the work of Jana Gunstheimer, Áron Kútvölgyi-Szabó, Agata Gertschen, Ondřej Přibyl, Joanna Leszczyńská and Ádam Kokesch, which are all the more impressive because they work with “traditional” media and practices. 
Continuity, the universality of the process of cognition and the formulation of one's own arguments or findings are a topic pursued by Nikolaus Gansterer. He also represents the centre of the spectrum – in a tradition in which, at least on a personal level, we follow the Renaissance idea of a centralised universe, in the middle of which stands man, not only as its recipient, but also as a reciprocally creative agent. The importance of the installation’s meaning is enhanced by the technique the artist adopts, drawing. 
The oscillation around this ever-changing focus then includes other artists, including those trying to recreate the moment of experience with what is, what serves for direct touch or view, e.g., Gábor Koós, Karol Pomykała and Ádam Albert, but also Anna Witt, her own work as well as a selection from Central European video art production. At the same time, they transcend the boundaries of the real, or the virtual, the possible, and show the great importance of storytelling, the story we share and the language we use to relate it. At the same time, they demonstrate the most important thing, i.e., that facts are established on the basis of a common culture, not the other way around. And that art permanently and constantly reveals what it means to create reality. 
In this constellation, the universum is a pliable structure. It is not complete or all-embracing. Its skeleton is human experience with the world – non-factual, complex and variable. What we share is a system of fixed points, and what makes it exceptional is what lies in between.

Part of the programme is a short-term exhibition of the author's light objects in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Wenceslas. It takes place from 5 August to 31 October 2021.

Jan Pamuła: Light Objects
"Abstract images refer to many facts: to the reality of man, nature, God. God can be present in every fact; however, an abstract image can be a dialogue with God without the transmission of another fact, it can be a prayer."

Selection of Works:

The Voice of the People (1991) was originally prepared for the exhibition Czechoslovak Photography in Exile (1992) and has not been re-exhibited since. 

What the Cleaners Found (1997, OMA) is a series of author's brochures covering the unintentional poetics of materials that accompany art school work-study rules and curricula, disciplinary rules, handbooks, circulars and reports, payroll, official correspondence, price list of office supplies and the author's own professional CV. It was created when Büchler was the head of the Glasgow School of Fine Arts. "A collection of small books by Pavel Büchler in many things captures the essence of his work and shows why his work stands out in a typical overproduction of contemporary fine art. In addition to Büchler's work based on his famous predecessors Beckett or Kafka, the collection acknowledges our limitations but still manages to come up with something extraordinary and precise. " (Charles Esche)

Tracing Paper (Drawings by Phone Numbers) (1966) 
“This work is one of the experiments that preceded or accompanied the creation of the What the Cleaners Found collection. The diagrammatic drawings capture the dynamics of the movement of official correspondence at an art school in a single week. They refer to the systematic procedures of conceptualism and simultaneously to automatic processes in the tradition of modern abstract art.” (Pavel Büchler)

The Commandment (2018)
“One of my experiments with the creation of printed text from incomplete files of letterpress fonts (so far the only one in Czech). All letters from a small sample of relief fonts I obtained from discarded material at the art school were used for the print. A text created by means that are practically out of service makes a statement that has permanent validity. This result is serendipitous. But for some readers chance itself is the result of God's providence.” (Pavel Büchler)

Lost Paintings (2021)
EW285 (Bluebeard's Castle at Night) 
EW482 (African Valküre at Night) 
EW1278 (Night Pool at Night) 
“The Lost Paintings cycle builds on long-term work with transforming pictures rejected by their creators or owners. The source in this case is the figurative canvases of the pornographic painter (and producer of pirated music recordings) Eddie Wolfram obtained as charity from the sale of his estate. The goal is to atone for and aesthetically justify the futile effort of the painter, who left behind only worthless waste. All paint was carefully removed from the canvases and then reapplied at random, with no particular composition, starting with the largest fragments and ending with dust. Setting aside the added time and work, the resulting pieces contain no more or less than the original paintings. Conceptually, the process returns, among other things, to the deconstruction of institutional texts from the 1990s.” (Pavel Büchler)

Trident (2006)
“The recording of a ballistic missile test-firing found on the internet was cut into loops of unequal length (approximately 3 to 4 seconds). These were then arranged in a random half-hour sequence, separately for each monitor. They are played back separately, so the constellation of the two images is almost never repeated exactly.” (Pavel Büchler) 

Anna Witt: Chorweiler Beat, 2016
HD Video, 14.00 min.
The project was developed in Chorweiler, a big suburb of Cologne. The heartbeat of inhabitants was recorded with an ultrasounds scanner and made into single audio tracks, which were performed individually by a group of a local young street dancers at the site.

Every first and third Saturday of the month starting with September 2021 we present:

Mykola Ridnyi: Grey Horses, 2016
HD video, 38 min.
kamera/ camera: Dmytro Pashko, Vadym Smarchenko, Pavlo Itkin, Mykola Ridnyi
s podporou/ with the support: Hromadske.ua
The narrative is based on the records of interrogations and memories of relatives of the unknown Ukrainian anarchist Ivan Krupskyi - great-grandfather of the film’s author. Documentary and staged episodes intertwine to reflect paradoxical periods of the hero’s life: leadership of a rebel group, participation in Civil war in the early 1920’s, hiding from persecution by taking the guise of a Soviet policeman, etc. This storytelling of the past is performed by today’s heroes: contemporary anarchists, police officers, students and workers. Using parallels between different times to mix reality and fiction, the film poses questions about controversies surrounding the construction of historical memory and glorification of historical figures in relation to current political agendas.

Maayan Amir & Ruti Sela: Beyond Guilt, 2003-2005
HD video, 42 min
The Beyond Guilt is a portrait of one generation. Shot in Tel Aviv, the short videos report contradictions of a society defined by power relations, commonly featuring subjects like artists and models, men and women, and the private and public domain. Their films offer a fresh examination of the influence of occupation, terror, and the army in Israeli identity. Even in the most private moments, sexual identity and political identity are inextricably linked in their works.

Manolis D. Lemos: dusk and dawn look just the same (riot tourism), 2017
HD Video, 3 min.
In a short document With dusk and dawn look just the same (riot tourism) (2017), the artist reflects upon the anti-austerity movements that first blossomed in Greece in 2010. They protested the creation of debt by the European Union, the inequitable practices put in place to resolve the issue, and the disenfranchisement and fear that has subsequently facilitated the rise of virulent nationalist parties.

Alicja Rogalska, Dreamed Revolution, 2015
HD video, 13: 43 min.
The documentary by the Polish author captures a meeting of local activists and city inhabitants of Łodž in northern Poland, invited to participate in an experimental workshop held at the Teatr Nowy [New Theather]. Hypnotized by a professional hypnotist they collectively articulated possible scenarios for a society of the future.

Bouchra Ouizguen: Corbeaux, 2014 
HD Video, 6 min.
The film captures a group of women dressed all in black save for the white cloths tied about their hair. They stand in geometric formation, swinging their heads forward and back, calling out in sharp and long sounds. The size of the movement and sound build together, drawing in the audience in a way that both references and evokes the affects of the ritual trance practices of the Marrakesh region on which the piece draws. Ouizguen calls Corbeaux “a sound sculpture, raw and urgent” that “flies toward” the public spaces where it is performed.

Nina Könnemann: What´s new, 2015
HD Video, 3:43 min.
For many years, Nina Könnemann has placed a camera before a billboard situated in the suburb Neukoln in Berlin. The silent film exposes both banal and paradoxical passages of time and space of the passers by highlights the transformation of public space. The surface of the exhibition — the billboard — becomes a wall behind which the fascination of the artwork concentrates.