Rooms Show: the Hrzán Palace comes alive with young art

The Hrzán Palace in Harasov, formerly the famous textile shop of Franz Kafka's parents, is now occupied by art and design students. The young art show Rooms 2022 will present the work of students from 13 universities from all over the country and, for the first time this year, from four foreign universities - Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Germany. The site-specific exhibition project with an accompanying programme will kick off on 11 November and run until 20 November.

The unique exhibition Rooms 2022 will present a selection of young art and design in non-traditional spaces for the eleventh time this year. Sixty groups from art schools across the Czech Republic applied for the open call, from which the organisers selected proposals representing thirteen institutions. This year, for the first time, they will also be joined by the work of students from four foreign universities - the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica and Bard College from Berlin.

Groups of students across studios will be given one entire room of the palace to create freely, so there will be a total of twenty-three originally conceived rooms on display. The exhibitors' imaginative projects will also fill the corridors and other corners of the Baroque pearl, which is normally closed to the public.

This year's theme is "Edges/Edges". The common theme serves as a unifying framework for the exhibition and as initial inspiration for the exhibitors to think about their installations. The selected exhibition projects thus include site-specific works dealing with aspects of social exclusion or the position of queer people in society, for example, or projects focusing on the thin line between human perception and the potential of artificial intelligence. Other participants are more formal or abstract in their intentions.

The show includes studios from both pure art and design schools, and the studios' focus ranges from sculpture, industrial design or film editing to new media, textile design or painting. In total, around 200 students from at least six European countries will participate in this unique exhibition project. One of the rooms will also feature students from the ranks of war refugees from Ukraine, who have been taken under the wing of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

"We have chosen the theme of this year's show as Edges. Our aim was to give space to neglected themes and artistic expressions that stand on the periphery, outside the mainstream. In addition, analogous to the theme, this year for the first time we have crossed the borders of our country and invited art students from foreign schools to participate," says the artistic director of the Rooms, Kamila Huptychová, who also works professionally at the Kampa Museum and in the past has participated in exhibitions at the Zone for Art 8smička in Humpolec or the NIKA gallery in Prague.

Previous editions of the show have been held since 2013, for example in empty houses in Cihelna Street in the Lesser Town or in the premises of the Hybernská Campus, followed in 2020 by the edition marked by the pandemic of Covid 19, the so-called Stay home edition, and last year Rooms revived the historic headquarters of the Czech National Social Party on náměstí Republiky. The Harasov Hrzán Palace will host the show for the first time this year.

Rooms is held with the financial support of the Prague City Hall, the Prague 1 Municipal District, the Visegrad Fund and the Czech-German Future Fund. The show will take place at the Hrzánský Palace thanks to the support of the Stadler-Trier music foundation.

This year's edition of the show has also been granted patronage by seven domestic universities:

Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Design and Art Ladislav Sutnar of the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Faculty of Art and Architecture of the Technical University in Liberec, Faculty of Art and Design of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Faculty of Art of the University of Ostrava, Faculty of Multimedia Communications of the Tomas Bata University in Zlín and UMPRUM or University of Applied Arts in Prague.

The organiser of the Rooms show is the Containall charity, which has been revitalising Prague's public spaces for many years and runs several cultural centres in the heart of Prague on a seasonal basis. It is behind the creation of the Fuchs2 cultural space, the Stalin Letná outdoor cultural centre, the Containall summer sports and cultural centre and the Baden Baden swimming pool on the island of Štvanice.

Read more: www.prehlidkapokoje.cz

Author of photos: Jan Hromádko