Five Uncertain Situations

Five Uncertain Situations is the first collaboration of the Prague Quiet Music Collective with the Prague City Gallery. PQMC approached five contemporary composers who were inspired by five artworks from the GHMP collections, and in response, composed new pieces.

Curator Jitka Hlavackova met composer, musician, and dramaturg Ian Mikyska in 2021 in the café of the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace, when he approached Prague City Gallery (GHMP) with the idea of setting to music part of the collections of the GHMP. This marked the beginnings of a remarkably interesting collaboration not just with Ian and his ensemble, the Prague Quiet Music Collective, but also with other young professional composers whose numbers, we hope, will continue growing regularly. The “composer’s team” for this pilot edition included the Slovak percussionist and composer based in Oslo Michaela Antalová, the American composer Jordan Dykstra, Sylvia Lim from the United Kingdom, and Czech composers Michal Wróblewski and Ian Mikyska. The aim of the collaboration inaugurated here is to gradu-ally develop an interdisciplinary dialogue between composers and works of visual and acoustic art of the 20th and 21st century and the creation of an open collection of original pieces of music related to artworks from the GHMP collections. The intended product of this collaboration is a cycle of concerts and exhibitions spread across several years, with Five Uncertain Situations being the first of these. In addition to the opening live concert, the project also includes presentations of the scores and recordings of these newly composed pieces, along with an exhibition of the selected artworks from our collection. The intended product of this collaboration is a cycle of concerts and exhibitions spread across several years, with Five Uncertain Situations being the first of these.

“The process of selecting the works Ian and I then presented to the invited composers as sources of inspiration for this edition was remarkable. We intuitively reached for works of an abstract or structural nature (though not exclusively); works that are related to existing forms of graphic notation; and, most importantly, processual pieces, or pieces whose conceptual makeup concerns temporality or impermanence. The resultant selection thus included kinetic sculpture, photography, video, performance documentation, and proces-sual or gestural paintings and drawings. The composers then made their decision based on this broader selection (following discussions with the curators and encounters with the works themselves), selecting as their sources of inspiration works by five Czech artists of various generations and aesthetic positions: Slovenian-born photographer Aleksandra Vajd, Czech sculptors active in the second half of the 20th century Stanislav Kolíbal and Radoslav Kratina, the sculptor Pavla Sceranková, and Marie Kratochvílová, a Brnoese photo-grapher mostly active in the 1970s and 1980s who was virtually unknown until recent years,” says Jitka Hlaváčková.

The opening live concert took plane on 9 December 2022, the project also included presentations of the scores and recordings of these newly composed pieces, along with an exhibition of the selected artworks.