Artists have always been commonly viewed as those who create images. In many cases it is of course still true, however, at the same time the situation in image production had already changed dramatically a long time ago – nowadays billions of pictures are being made every day worldwide by ‚ordinary people‘ with their smart devices (and a few conservative enthusiasts using analogue cameras) and other billions are being produced by ‚machine-like producers‘ united by more and more densely interconnected network of so-called The Internet of Things. Simple creation of images has lost its exclusiveness over the past 150 years of technical devices existence and the artists have mostly become those who ‚deal with‘ images: they make collages, assemble, style, diverge images from their automated paths and with not only the above-mentioned interventions they open a new space for their nouveau or just different understanding. Some artists approach images as players, others as provocateurs or explorers diving under their seemingly flat and plain surface and thus discover layers within, not visible at the first glance.

Each image, once created, is put into some kind of motion with very variable and diverse dynamics in time. Anyway while ‚handeling the image‘ we are talking about here, it is necessary to freeze it temporarily in its motion. That applies also to static images such as photographs. The motion of a photograph is given by its use – personal photos have a different trajectory and impact than those distributed on a mass scale. The exposition Blind Spots by David Možný presents his work with photographs from the 1960s and 1970s that were published in mass-market printed books, however today they are somehow dead, on the bookcase shelves in flats, libraries, and secondhand bookshops. Možný animates these photographs in both meanings of the word. Thanks to digital devices he ‚dissects‘ the photographs and finds in them important personal motives, then he sorts them into layers and thus obtained collection of symbols he subsequently puts into motion. He animates the photographs also in the figurative sense in the same way, he revitalizes them, enables them to renter into a vivid relationship with new viewers, most of whom were not even born when the pictures were taken.

In the first two exposition rooms of the gallery, the spectators are being confronted with ‚originals‘ and enlargements of photographs derived from four-channel frames of a CMYK animation (2017), they refer to their time of taking not only by images they represent but also by a simple fact that they are (were) static images. Statuesqueness had a very important role in the last century especially for authoritarian regimes (such as the one in the 1980s in DDR), however, the situation did not really differ in the ‚free world‘ – at least to the intent that even there the government was linked to establishing and controlling institutions enforcing certain order. The satisfaction for respecting the discipline (within the family circle, at school, in the army or at work) was the expectation of perspective life. That is indeed something that has completely and irreversibly disappeared over the last 30 years. ‚Everything is on the move‘ is not any more an elegant philosophical thesis but more of a fact. Uncertainty has become for most of us the number one feeling that is being compensated by inclination to conservatism and authoritarianism. These not often reflected aspects of desire for stability comeback are in culture commonly reflected by ‚good old times‘ nostalgy.

The work with photo archives has become so relevant over the fifteen years or so, not only because thanks to them we rediscover the past but also because of the fact the desire for the lost world images reflects the present. David Možný‘s approach to visual materials from the era closely preceding the end of modernity corresponds with the approach of many other artists who have also concentrated on work with archives, for example, Agnieszka Polska, Phil Collins, Deimantas Narkevicius or Czech artist Zbyněk Baladrán. The fact that the above-mentioned artists focus their work mainly on images taken in European socialist state regimes has its deep meaning, hard for us to imagine today – in these regimes the image of stable life has stayed preserved for much longer than in ‚the democratic West‘.

The way the exposition Blind Spot is installed into two parts, which differ not only in the basic model of gallery presentation (white cube vs. black cube) but also in the creation date of the images or rather pre-images we are looking at. Blind Spots (2016) – a video recording placed in the last, dark room of the gallery – is the result of a digital postproduction of a shot taken by the author himself in Berlin Stasi Museum. The film clip of an empty interior, once used as an office of a military hospital director, provides us with a kind of identical ‚reality‘, such as the one presented in photographs in the first two rooms. The soundtrack David Možný inserted in the video relates to the image in a similarly speculative way the author uses to approach the latent action contained in source photographs from the CMYK animation. Here we can also see that the ‚burden‘ of image animation is equally spread among the author and the spectators.

In the first two rooms, as was already mentioned above, there are animated photographs taken over from picture books representing ‚everyday reality‘ of East, and in one case also of West Germany. Photographs published in these books, as well as those appearing on postcards or in calendars, were in principal taken by anonymous photographers-craftsmen. The images have unambiguously identified motives and they respect genre conventions. Even though it may look that way at first sight, their main purpose was not to capture an image of reality – on the contrary, they were supposed to create it by virtue of mass distribution in books published on an unimaginably mass scale for us today.
As far as it similar ‚ lifestyle images‘ concerns they were not part of hard propaganda but rather a systematic infication of collective imagination through images that could serve as a common reference frame and thanks to mass distribution they performed the role of TV (especially in the East it was mainly a black and white TV), which was not that well accessible at that time. A logical question comes to mind, to what degree these images embellish the reality or distorted, hid, or even generated it. David Možný tries to answer this question which does not however force him to reduce the choice of pictures to pictures making the narration shallow, hiding unwanted facts, e.g. those known form our history in connection with Vladimír Clementis, who was not only executed after a party purge but also deleted from photographs where he was standing alongside Klement Gottwald. Among the chosen photographs we can find those, where an oppressive point of political reality can still be found, something that should have been suppressed or ideally absolutely hidden in such ‚apolitical‘ images. The photo of a group of ‚tourists‘ by the Brandenburg Gate manifests this phenomenon the best. In a seemingly innocent snapshot, in reality, it is a carefully planned photo set-up, we can see a discrete pale horizontal line of The Berlin Wall spreading behind the famous monument columns – on other occasions The Wall was properly exposed however in this picture it was pushed into the background as deep as possible...

The way this particular photograph is embodied into the installation of the exposition Blind Spots suggests a specific model of an inquisitive look. The ‚full shot‘ in the first room of the gallery is only a part of the whole original photograph. On one hand, the use of enlargement on the distant wall of the second room only intensifies the attention attraction to ‚a blind spot‘, on the other hand, the chances of reading a photograph as a realistic portrayal are radically diminished with the extreme enlargement once we are too close to the image. Our own movement, as well as the movement of the four-channel animation simulated by ‚camera sliders‘ of individual static images within the space, thus defines not only the possibilities but at the same time the limits of a photograph reading. David Možný via his exposition Blind Spots does not only provide us with instructions of how to read photographs in the form of legends for chosen images. Instead, he leaves us enough space to discover the blind spots of the images and to vivify them by our own movement and sensory reception.