▓ Episode I. - Collection in the Museum

The exhibition focuses on the ways of collecting objects from the Chrudim Museum with a long tradition dating back to the 19th century and the Sculpture Studio of the Academy of Arts Architecture & Design in Prague (UMPRUM), which only established its collection on 17 November 2014 as one of its teaching methods. We were interested in how the collections relate to their present, what they use to represent and name it, what the curators of each collection collect in the 21st century and why. Whether they are Sisyphus-like trying to fill in the holes in the image of history with a tiny budget or trying to capture the image of contemporary society with its surreal production of the post-industrial and digital era. In this exploration, we were assisted by the museum's director and the curators of the collections, who gave us valuable interviews over the objects acquired after 2000, which they selected for our exhibition from its "depositories". In the exhibition, these exhibits take the role of static objects on a pedestal. We can imagine them as immobile actors on a stage, coming to life in the ways in which their curators and UMPRUM students talk about them. At the same time, however, it is the objects themselves that carry the potential and direction of future debates over them. They thus determine the ways in which people gather around them, behave around them, transmit them and show them, and through them they reflect on their existence and reveal their emotions. That is why we have displayed these things on circular pedestals resembling debates in a circle, a place for gathering or a stage for performance. We have left them in loose relationships with each other without accompanying interpretation, which at times sparkle with a touch of the concreteness of words or the abstraction of sound. The sound recordings are based on student discussions over lists of the museum's acquisitions since 2000 and on conversations with curators of the collections.