Excavating Solidarity: Zbyněk Baladrán, Marta Popivoda, Nikita Kadan

As part of the upcoming Biennale Matter of Art 2024 and in cooperation with the Lidice Memorial and the Lidice Art Collection, tranzit.cz invites you to an encounter with the artists Zbyněk Baladrán, Nikita Kadan, and Marta Popivoda, who will share insights into their research for the biennale, focusing on questions around the politics of memory, solidarity art collections, spectral museums, and feminist storytelling in connection with the complex history of Lidice.

Please note that the event will be in English with Czech translator available on site.

In the form of a performative walk, filmmaker Marta Popivoda will engage with interventions into the landscape of Lidice – from its destruction to its reconstruction – through the lens of landscape dramaturgy and feminist storytelling. She will share her interest in this interplay of embodied, human, and more-than-human experiences and talk about her work on anti-fascist memory and her own practice of listening, asking: Whose voices do we listen to? How do stories travel from one body to another? 

After an introduction to the Lidice Art Collection by its curator Miloslav Vorlíček, Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan will share his experience of working with the prominent modern art collection of the Kmytiv Museum of Soviet Art in the context of Russia's ongoing imperialist invasion of Ukraine, policies of decommunization, and the crisis situation with museums and art collections in the country in general.

The artist talk will be followed by the screening of Marta Popivoda's experimental documentary Landscapes of Resistance (in English with Czech subtitles), which tells the story of Sonja, one of the first female partisans in Yugoslavia, through contemporary images of landscapes that witnessed different events of her life in the resistance as well as intimate footage of Sonja in her home, where she recounts memories and discusses politics, with sensitive close-ups that transform her body and surroundings into a human landscape.

In an open discussion moderated by the biennale curators, Aleksei Borisionok and Katalin Erdődi, the three invited artists will share their views on practices of resistance, solidarity, and remembering and explore tensions between memory and history, ideology and everyday life.

This event is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, the Czech-German Fund for the Future and The City of Prague.