Mirror for Proteus

Side programme: 

Prague Art Week: 25. – 28. 9. 2025

Curator’s tour: 25. 9. 2025, 17:00

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If we were to visit the archive of the Department of Photography of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), and if we thumbed the books which the students developed over the years as part of their two-semester course called “Face and Body,” we may be surprised that they are very similar to one another. The works coming out of this course – which focuses on teaching the studio lighting of a human figure – are usually done with a white background and shot from similar angles, and they usually share very similar material parameters. This is especially the case for the books which were compiled soon after the department’s founding in 1975. The male and female nudes are bound in books with a spine length of 28cm maximum which, according to some, was the perfect height for fitting into the shelves in which the books were to be archived after being marked.

If we were to adopt a critical stance toward this micro-historical sample (as, for example, proposed by Allan Sekula in his book The Body and the Archive), with a bit of hyperbole we could state that the works contained therein reflect certain aspects of the school’s actual regime and operations. Rather than being a document of the identities of the photographed and photographing subjects, they provide a window into a particular institutional bias. It must also be noted that “Face and Body” primarily focused on a technical task, so its outcomes are not intended to provide some purely original testimony but rather show a certain standardized regime of seeing, one which owes much to the modernist approach to photography. The identity of the person depicted melds into their bodily proportions and becomes a typified attribute of the image – or, alternately, the archive – rather than something which would exceed it.

From today’s perspective, it is striking how intensely this pattern of power – which has been a staple of technical images since the 19th century – also influenced the curricula which were taught at FAMU. It is quite possible that this was due to the institution’s close relationship with the film industry or teacher Ján Šmok’s focus on cinematography. Whatever the cause may have been, the medium was conclusively approached through a technicist lens, meaning it was rather about thinking through the camera than theorizing the camera itself. As part of this exhibition project initiated on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the department’s founding, we would like to distance ourselves from these early attempts connected with the objectification of the body, and rather aim to offer a few methods through which to reflect the categories of corporeality and identity in a more complex manner and within the context of the contemporary media sphere.

The methods of controlling society and individuals have significantly changed over the last few decades. Whereas in the past power used to be external, repressive and centralized, today it has become ever more disseminated. As Bernard E. Harcourt writes in his book Exposed, the advent of the social network has made public space one great data supermarket whose visitors no longer hide from systemic oversight but rather voluntarily perform for it. It is no longer viable to normatively control identity, as with the help of the new informational infrastructures it can now be effectively capitalized and shaped. The sharing of personal details used to be taboo, while nowadays it seems to offer an unprecedentedly attractive, even inevitable, method of acting in the world.

The newly formed relationship between the real and the so-called virtual world is, however, deeply reciprocal. For a long time, we have been seeing that digital identities significantly impact the actions of users also beyond the limits of the social network itself. The avatars which represent us in these spaces function as beta-versions of our identities on which we test all those expressions we would be too shy to perform elsewhere. When one of the virtual images resonates with the user base, its features are integrated into action in real life. This increases the number of identitarian frames circulating within society. Psychology conceptualizes this as the “Protean effect” in reference to one of the minor gods of the classical pantheon. Proteus was a herder of seals, and he was able also transform into any living or non-living entity. In Greek culture or the plays of Shakespeare, this figure is presented as essentially unstable and usually appears during a narrative’s turning point.

Without necessarily implying that the massive increase in protean entities is leading us towards a historical turning point, we may consider this phenomenon one of the central drivers of the ongoing social transformation, certainly making it worthy of artistic reflection. That is why we ask whether the character of this fluid classical god may also play a role in the formation of values, for example in the sphere of labor. In the virtual sphere, the formerly physical activity of work has become notably similar to affect and play. Much like Proteus could turn into a tree, snake or lion, the world of social networks amplifies phenomena such as gender stereotyping and misogyny, and this in turn impacts people’s interactions in real life.

This short text presents some of the dynamics which have informed the works of the featured artists and aims to show that if we wish to speak about the body and identity today, we need to start with the afore-mentioned data supermarket where these representations multiply, expand, and are sold every day. The plethora of digital avatars ultimately leads us to another type of body whose existence stands beyond any power system – the body which falls apart and rots; the body which will never again work, play or be affected. The body which has left behind only a media index, ready to be cataloged in the archive. Whether seen as imprints of a rigid school task within the standardized dimensions of the archive shelf, or as an expanded toolbox, they both have one thing in common – they are like a body which has been spent and harvested by the reigning status quo and its surveillance apparatus. As hopeless as this situation may seem, this exhibition shows that it can be subverted by placing a mirror before it and making present the ways in which the media sphere’s structure projects itself into the minds of the very people who are helping to form it.

Text editing / Redakce textů: Viktorie Vítů, Vít Bohal

Translations / Překlad: Vít Bohal

Production / Produkce: Nikola Brabcová, Martin Netočný

Technical support / Technická podpora: Ondřej Konrád, Jiří Kaňák, Trang Erika Nguyen Thu

Acknowledgement / Poděkování: Galerie hlavního města Prahy