Depository Archeology

One of the great adventures of learning is the effort to uncover the ancient sediments of the past. It seems that it is not particularly relevant whether this means a mental fragment from yesterday that we find hard to grasp or a civilisational habit thousands of years old. Visual art is the supreme arena in which diverse contexts meet and are able to constantly change their status. Each of the artists presented at Depository Archeology reaches into the past, searching under multiple layers of meanings and techniques to find a point that is appropriate for reincarnation, re-introduction, or a new articulation.

We can find in Maxim Velčovský’s ceramic vessels fragments of ancient functional objects serving mundane purposes. Ceramic shards, incidentally, are some of the oldest archaeological discoveries used to determine the age of cultures long gone. A quintessential relic of the past is the ancient Japanese technique making use of a combination of fish glue, volcanic ash, and silver. Artist Shuhei Fukuda transforms this thousand-year-old tradition into a contemporary minimalist form. Jiří Krejčiřík explores the history of architecture, selecting certain elements, multiplying them, and setting them into a new design context. And the most recent works by Jozef Mrva Jr. are a good example of a multi-layered mosaic that brings together many interpretive layers within the post-modern multiverse.