Exhibition concept/curator - Lada Hubatová Vacková
MG Curator - Andrea Březinová
The Jurkovič House built in 1906 for which this exhibition was created blends the elements of "primitive" folk art with modern architecture of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The traditional folk ornamentation on the house frontage and polychrome carvings of the beams are combined with regular square grids in thevein of popular designs by the contemporaneous Scottish architect and designerC.R. Mackintosh, the Wiener Werkstätte and Japanese art. The architecture of the house echoes the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts, a conservative English movement that condemned machines and other achievements of industrial civilization. However, the house also contained electric lighting and hot-air central heating, as well as the latest sanitation.
The Jurkovič House is a prime example of the clash between the old and the new, the "low" and the "high" - the folk and the elitist, the national and the international, the traditional and the progressive, an idyllic country cottage and an urban villa, a folk pastoral and a modern lifestyle. It manifests how to link the opposite poles of the folk and the modern.
The "Modfolk" project is, to some extent, a homage to the original symbiosis of the modern and the folk advocated by Dušan Jurkovič (1868-1947), as well as his Brno friends including composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) and Josef Vydra (1884-1959), a teacher and applied arts reformer with whom Jurkovič founded the Moravian Centre for Applied Folk Arts in Brno in 1908. Neither Jurkovič nor Janáček and Vydra intended to conserve and archive folk tradition as a rigid ethnographic and historical phenomenon, without a possibility of development and contemporary reflection.
The point of departure for this exhibition was to present an up-to-date version of combining modern design with folk tradition. The authors approached fashion designer Liběna Rochová who has addressed the issue of reflecting traditions in fashion design since the 1980s when she collaborated with the ÚLUV (Centre of Folk and Art Production) institute. Liběna Rochová heads the Studio of Fashion and Footwear Design at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and the subject of "modernity in folkness" was set to her students as a semestral assignment, with the aim to display their designs in the Jurkovič House.
Modern reinterpretations of folk costumes are not limited to embroideries but are rooted, in particular, in the austerity of form, simple cuts, functionality and the quality of natural materials. Liběna Rochová decided to restrict the colour scale of the students' designs to the shades of grey and the materials to two traditional ones, linen and felt, in order to make the students concentrate on the concept and form. Each student approached the task from a different angle, as is demonstrated by their collections and the accompanying synopses. Some created ready-to-wear (prêt-à-porter) models, others came close to fashion objects. In this respect, the work of Pavlína Miklasová stands out: she has "woven" onto the flower beds in the Jurkovič House garden a symbolic folk-type shirt covered with rose bushes resembling live folk ornaments. Her work is anchored in fashion design, yet it is also close to land-art.
The exhibition features photographic collections with two kinds of photos. There are ethnographic photographs of the Slovak population from the village of Dobšiná taken in the 1920s, i.e. the period when, in rural Slovakia, the traditional met the modern and folk costume met townwear. The iconography and the spellbinding visuality of these historical photographs, whose author is today forgotten Josef Tachecí, were reintepreted by Ondřej Přibyl in the photographic documentation of the students' collections.
"Modernity in Folkness", the project's title, is abbreviated to "Modfolk", a neologism combining the words "modern" and "folk" that also works as a brand, since brands are now a natural part of the fashion business, and that can be understood both in Czech and in English.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication by Lada Hubatová-Vacková (ed.), Modfolk. Modernita v lidovém / Modernity in Folkness, UMPRUM Praha 2015 (graphic design by Štěpán Marko, photography by Ondřej Přibyl).
