This year´s Festival Fotograf is
entitled Eye in the Sky
deals with the universal
digital presence,
constant surveillance and the way
this presence influences
our behavior in our everyday
lives
and possibilities to live
freely in this world.
This year we tried to cover
a slightly narrower spectrum
of international presentations.
Trevor Paglen represents a kind of
middle moment of something
that becomes descriptive
and aestheticized,
because the visual material
we can see here
might give the impression of
being too refined,
and artificial, in the eyes
of some viewers.
But this is one of the
basis in Trevor´s thinking
about how something so
present and so terrifying
such as constant surveillance
by large intelligence agencies,
whose activities Trevor deals with
in his own work as well as
in cooperation with Laura Poitras,
how to transfer this material
into something visual
bearing this, I´d say, horror,
and in very diversified sub-lines
of the actual content.
Although we do not omit
Czech artists
so the backbone of the
exhibition program
is based on four exhibitions.
Exhibition of Kajsa Dahlberg
and Jirka Skála in Hunt Kastner
and Trevor Paglen in
Fotograf Gallery,
and Metahaven in Futura,
Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas
in Tranzit or more precisely Display.
There is also a discursive program,
including discussions, presentations,
screenings
and performances.
The main exhibitions form a
kind of timeline,
mainly if we consider Metahaven,
Joreige,  Hadjithomas and
Trevor Paglen because this
theme
is very present on the
international art scene
and very resounding
 in the past few years.
The exhibition in Display of the
Lebanese film duo
Joreige and Hadjithomas
focuses on problems of
spam emails,
which we might see now as 
an issue of the late nineties
and the first decade
of the new millennium,
and in our present time of fake news
and targeted Facebook and
manipulative apparatus
and the complicated narratives,
which they develop in their work,
it´s difficult to regard this
as something up-to-date,
but, as I said, it forms
a point on a given timeline.
We collaborated with Marie Lukáčová,
who made a series of screenings
in a shop selling electronics.
The typical shop environment suddenly
changed into a space for presenting art.
There were naturally other activities,
including a longterm residence in
Prague for the artist duo EEEFFF,
crowned by their performance
and lectures.
Or there were screenings of
various films,
which we may regard today
as chef-d´oeuvres
of contemporary film
with regard to this theme,
whether it was HyperNormalisation
by Adam Curtis
or films by Laura Poitras
or a film by Werner Herzog,
in which he tries to analyze
this theme
with Herzog´s very powerful
poetics.
So this way we close a
certain whole, a certain axis,
a certain circle of revolving contents
which despite resounding on the art
scene of international character,
so they continuously enable
some sort of further thinking.
