Adam Vackar
The First and Last Things
Prague City Gallery, Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, Prague
Curated by Sandra Baborovská
September 19, 2014 – February 2, 2015

The exhibition The First and Last Things by Adam Vackar, presented in the Baroque spaces of Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, takes its title from the philosophical text by the English writer H. G. Wells. Wells’s reflections on society, belief, mortality, and human desire form a conceptual frame for a group of works examining the tensions between value, illusion, and material culture in contemporary life.

Vačkář’s installations and photographs explore how systems of belief—once structured by religion or metaphysics—are increasingly replaced by symbolic forms generated within consumer culture. The exhibition reflects on how modern societies construct myths, values, and desires through objects, images, and aesthetic systems. In the photographic series The Beautiful and the Damned (2014), bouquets composed of artificial, fresh, and decaying flowers blur the boundary between life and imitation. The work resonates with ideas of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who described contemporary society as a realm where representations gradually replace reality itself.

The central installation in the palace’s main hall takes the form of a large-scale sound environment rooted in the artist’s family history. The work draws on the lives of Vačkář’s two grandfathers: one a composer, the other a general who fought against Nazi forces during the Second World War. Using weapons confiscated by his grandfather during the war, the artist created a series of perforated musical scores by shooting through sheets of notation. These damaged scores are presented on tables throughout the space. At the center of the Baroque hall stands a monumental structure resembling a hybrid between organ pipes and artillery cannons. Long steel tubes emit a noise-based composition generated through the process of searching for tones within the perforated scores. The sounds were produced using analog synthesizers that translate electrical frequencies into musical tones. The resulting installation stages a confrontation between music and violence, transforming the brutality of war into an unsettling acoustic composition.