Zbyněk Baladrán “Diagram”
Shedhalle / Exhibitions / Cross-fades / Artists
Zbyněk Baladrán “Diagram”, (photography by Willi Najvar), 2007
Diagram (Monument to Transformation – Fragment #3)
Text and photography (Willi Najvar, 1970), 2007
“Diagram”, consisting partly of text and partly of photography is a fragment of the long-time project “Monument to Transformation” (1989–2009) of Zbyněk Baladrán from Prague. Starting out with a simple table depicting the grammatical tenses on an x- and on a y-axis, Baladrán unfolds a wide range of topics: they are geared toward the political, cultural, social as well as individual changes that characterised the transformation of Czech society during the past 50 years (from the Soviet predominance after WW II to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the foundation of the independent Czech Republic in 1992).
These subtle processes are documented in a quasi archaeological manner and within a defined topical framework (“Change” and “People Speaking”) by privately taken photographs of varying origin. Using this system of texts and pictures Baladrán proposes a participative artistic approach that formalises memory, experience, and historical knowledge. In an alphabetical systematisation he evokes the concept of classification as used in the sciences, the text itself, however, in its meaning, contrary to the scientific appearance, changes from one letter of the alphabet to the other by following associations rather than logic. Anecdotes, individual, super-individual, and national stories are intertwined to form a fabric that appears or claims to be scientific but, at the same time, shows the inconsistencies, and occasionally questions itself.