CO14 2003–2005

This publication features lectures and public presentations of selected artists, art groups and initiatives, curators, and critics.

The AVU Research Centre in Prague is publishing CO14 2003–2005 as part of the research project Czech Art in the Period of Post-Socialism Transformation (1980–2005).

This publication features lectures and public presentations of select artists, art groups and initiatives, curators and art critics. The three-year cycle of these activities took place at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University in Prague, deliberately not in an established art institution.

Although the organizers of the lectures preface the publication as a collection of documents that has not been completely organized, it has a clear structure and represents and extensive database of thoughts and information that will play a significant role in interpreting art of the 1990s and of the first decade of the 21st century. The book includes mainly Czech artists who changed the course of art following the postmodern period of the 1980s and who thereby opened the space for the present-day young generation.

The publication contains writings by the artists, select criticism and texts by curators, pictorial documentation and survey responses. The textual part is already today a valuable archive that includes theses defences, in which the initial formulations of the artist’s own approach often appears. The survey, whose questions were thoroughly modified for each artist, is then a separate part of the publication. This book is undoubtedly among the most extensive fine arts projects of its kind in the Czech Republic. It presents a separate collection of views and attitudes of a representative sample of artists of the 1990s.

An archive of collective and solo exhibitions, of artwork reproductions and the setting of art studios was created in the pictorial part from artist documents. This archive contains a large number of unknown and never-before published pictures.