INTERIM REPORT: CAPITALISM RESTORATION IN CENTRAL EUROPE
a project by Zbyněk Baladrán

Zbyněk Baladrán’s Interim Report collages were created from product advertisement leaflets distributed by several sorts of companies to mailboxes and a data form created by him to sample the imagosphere pertaining to this market universum. It is not easy to describe in brief, the social shifts towards a more economically stratified society in former socialist countries.
The society of today is radically different than the one that in the 20th century attempted to create a historic alternative for us all .

Consumer society is the current status quo, a normativity that narrows the capacity of imagining another future. Zbyněk tries to see it, sample it, make it emerge in all its stripped and bare filthy triviality. And these filthy images flow through mind and fingers thanks to the consumeristic propaganda of our current socio-economic arrangement.

Zbyněk Baladrán is an author, visual artist and curator. He studied art history at the Charles University Philosophical Faculty in Prague from 1992-1996, and from 1997-2003 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of visual communication. He is one of the co-founders and a curator of Galerie display, which was established in Prague in 2001, and in 2007 merged with tranzit.cz into tranzitdisplay, where he continues to oversee the exhibition program. He is also the co-curator, with Vít Havranek, of the project and exhibitions Monument to Transformation, a 3-year research project on social transformation that was presented in 2009 at the Prague City Gallery, and which traveled to several other locations in Europe later this year. Baladrán was also a part of the team of curators (tranzit.org) for Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain in 2010. His artworks can be characterized as the search for links between the past and its construction in relation to the prevailing epistemological patterns. His works are represented in various international private and public collections.

salvator rosa