The exhibition project for the Kabinet T. Gallery is designed as one audiovisual environment. The intensity of the two poles between physical and visual gets weakened in favour of analogue and digital forms' permeability. The image of blurred boundaries between reality and virtuality, between the object, the painting and space is being developed based on relative and subjective perception. Attention is paid to the track of time while simultaneously questioning the ambivalence of its perception, measuring and formatting within media.

An example of this sort of environment is a set of video performances. The final setting suggests overstepping the boundaries of the space organised by Cartesian coordinates out into the imaginary fiction field. A blank white canvas becomes the working space for openly structured spatiotemporal plans in a united physical and virtual environment. However, the principles of media are changed. A hanging painting disunites from the wall, yet the projection of a digital image remains static. Finally, mutual cooperation and synchronisation of the image formats develop a time illusion of elastic, shape, and three-dimensional changes, which may provoke questions of this constructed reality's authenticity.

Curator text

Daniel Hanzlík’s (b. 1970) seven video-installations form part of his exhibition Continual Transitions in Kabinet T. Gallery. These video-installations meticulously embody the essence of Hanzlík’s recent artistic “research”.

The origins of Hanzlík’s contemporary intermedial work might be found in his studying under professor Vladimír Kopecký at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design from 1989-1995. Kopecký’s atelier primarily focused on glasswork and enabled its students to experiment with spatial and installation art pieces. While studying, Hanzlík met Pavel Mrkus, who would become his longterm artistic companion and, later, his teaching colleague. They currently lead the Time-Based Media atelier together at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně at the Faculty of Arts and Design in Ústí nad Labem. As a result, Hanzlík divides his time between Prague, Ústí nad Labem and his birthplace, Teplice.

Daniel works with a wide range of media: video, hanging painting, video performance, spatial installation (often using new media elements, including experiments with interactive media), and he does not refrain from intervening into the public sphere. Despite this rich array of expressive tools, Hanzlík’s artwork is always of a distinct character and carries the unmistakable authorial mark. Thematically, he has a longstanding interest in the complicated relationship between representation and reality, and his work often focuses on schemes, simplified models of space, or spatial situations – he creates semantic and spatial paradoxes, tautologies, or optical deceptions. Significantly, corporeality plays an essential role in his art, through the physical presence of either the author or the spectator. However, ephemeral entities, such as light, are likewise often present. Hanzlík’s experiments resemble a game whose rules the artist bends and deforms to observe, with curious suspense, how the game handles his external manipulations.

At the core of Hanzlík’s current exhibition in Kabinet T. Gallery are five autonomous video-performances from his 2019-2020 series, Default Settings. In Zlín’s exhibition hall, this series is exhibited using three large-format screens and two video projections. Additionally, this series is accompanied by a video installation called Change of the Horizon, produced in 2018. The whole exhibition then concludes with a video projection Behind One’s Shadow created in the same year.

The use of the geometrical projection principle (that is, the representation of geometrical shapes on a flat surface) and its deceptive, irritating distractions acts as the connective force between Default Settings’ video performances. Although the artist’s technical tools are simple in an elegant way, this technique is often initially misunderstood as being a generated digital effect. What is at work here is a tautological cycle, doubling of representation. Therefore, we are looking at an image of an image and a representation of a representation. The source of the final output of all five video performances is a standard video projector. The represented shapes throughout individual performances involve: the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, sinusoid, circle, a space defined using perspective and black-and-white photography of a full moon. The projection plane is always a painter’s white canvas (size varies with each performance) held by the author-performer himself standing in front of a blank white wall. While performing, Daniel tilts the canvas, thus changing the angle of the projection plane in relation to the projected image, deforming the final image. The whole performance is recorded with a video camera and then projected to a life-size scale on a large-formation monitor. Crucially, two of the performances were recorded in Kabinet T. Gallery itself – the same place they are now being presented. Thus, the previously mentioned principle of the tautological cycle becomes intensified. The represented image is being projected on the surface of the image being represented itself. At this point, it is impossible not to mention the famous tale by Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science, in which the cartographers created a map of the Empire so large that it matched the dimensions of the Empire itself. The image of reality, in this case, a map, enabled to cover reality itself.

Similarly, the video installation Change of the Horizon works with the doubling of the real and represented subject. In this case, the projected image of a camera tripod partially intervenes into the actual object’s space, the tripod bearing the projector. The video shows one of the tripod’s feet standing in a sea breaker, and as the waters eat away the supporting grounds, the camera shot becomes shifted and deformed. As with the aforementioned installation, this video performance deconstructs the relationship between represented reality and actual reality.

Located in the exhibition’s final room, the concluding video, Behind One’s Shadow, emphasises its mere filmic aspects. It consists of consecutive twenty-seconds shots of the artist’s fast-paced walk through an urban landscape. The scene is of a dynamic cut to evoke the sense of subsequent footsteps and so a continuous walk despite the constant changes in the setting. The focal point of the image composition, the overarching element of all shots, is Hanzlík’s shadow always pointing forward in the camera lens’s direction. Out of all exhibited works, Behind One’s Shadow distinctively shows the artist’s ludic tendencies in the form of a strictly set film canon – the sunshine is always behind the cameraman’s back. The motif of a scheme is again present. However, it stays unexposed among the rules structuring the video form.

Hanzlík’s work’s fundamental principles lie in both duality and permeability of two contradictory particularities: the analogue and digital medium, physical and virtual reality, two-dimensional image and three-dimensional object. Crucially, the continual transitions between these opposites form the substance of Hanzlík’s meditations and semantic rebuses. Physical presence also plays a significant role – the artist himself or technical tools contrast the more ephemeral essence of projected geometric schemes and models. Hanzlík focuses on the ambivalence of perception and experience of space, its measuring and formatting while he is simultaneously unsettling the spectator’s perception.

Along with Jan Šerých and Jan Nálevka, Daniel Hanzlík is one of the most prominent figures in Czech reductively oriented Postconceptualism and has held a firm position in the local art scene for many years.