Dear visitors, the event Listening Eyes is cancelled on October 28 and 29 due to the illness of the main protagonist. We apologize to those who were looking forward to this accompanying programme. Thank you for your understanding.

Project Listening Eyes (Nahlížet nasloucháním) will present an installation of the same name by artist Kateřina Vincourová and music by Miroslav Srnka in the Rudolfinum Ceremony Hall. We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, October 28, and Wednesday, October 29, both days starting at 6 pm. Admission is CZK 180 and tickets will be available for purchase directly at Galerie Rudolfinum box office.

The event is an accompanying programme to our current exhibition Kateřina Vincourová Skin Care.

Listening Eyes

The spatial aspect of musical production is emphasized in the form of a sculpture-installation-environment and displays all the hallmarks of the artist, whose work significantly shaped Czech art in the 1990s. Kateřina Vincourová’s large-scale, visually impressive installation of the same name radically changes the way music is perceived, activating the audience while imposing restrictions of a different kind than those to which it is accustomed in the classic division of space into stage and auditorium. As in other important works by Kateřina Vincourová, the object Listening Eyes (Nahlížet nasloucháním) is a generous, even monumental gesture by the author, based on questioning the inside and outside, the delimited or emphasized emptiness as an opposing principle to the massive fullness of matter. Intimacy and its experience are presented as a theme on a paradoxically oversized scale, thus deprived of the marginal, trivial position to which it is subordinated by the dominant view of the world as a place of rational stability or fixed order governed by performance.

–⁠⁠⁠ Marek Pokorný, curator, art theorist and director of PLATO Ostrava

The object Listening Eyes (Nahlížet nasloucháním) redefines the space in which it is located. In the case of the Rudolfinum Ceremony Hall, it creates a soft yet functional textile counterbalance to the noble and ornate Neo-Renaissance mass. The horizontal tensioned sail with circular openings inside contrasts with the marble staircase, wooden floors, masonry of the entrance arches, and vertical false columns. What the spaces probably have in common is a kind of openness to the ‘sky’: the courage to leave the building roofless and the generosity of the glass ceiling of the hall, reminding the observer-listener of the alternation of light and darkness, the sound of rain and the silence of the sun.

–⁠⁠⁠ David Danel, artistic director of Prague Modern

About the project

The project connecting Czech visual artists with music composers in new, unexpected collaborations was initiated for the Prague Modern ensemble in 2011 by Didier Montagne, then director of the French Institute in Prague. The starting point for the search for new relationships and new works was the previous ‘ignorance’ and ‘lack of cooperation’ between artists, despite their constant openness to new ideas, willingness to listen, be surprised, and see things in a new light. This radically new entity, which also initiated a radically new existence of space, musical expression within it, and the shared act of listening, is perhaps most aptly characterized by the names given to the object-action by its creators during the creative process: ‘plate, UFO plate’ (Kateřina Vincourová) and ‘enter the sound, hear the space’ (Miroslav Srnka). The object Listening Eyes (Nahlížet nasloucháním) was first presented in 2015 at the PLATO gallery in Ostrava.

–⁠⁠⁠ David Danel, artistic director of Prague Modern