Franklin Evans’ process-oriented painting installations offer measurements of architectural space, image materiality and time.  He presents a theatrical painting environment that, through viewer interaction and time's passage, collapses, accelerates and simultaneously extends its own archivality and the idea of the archival.   In floornote2010, diaristic drawings and recorded thought from the recent past (2005-2010) are laminated and laid as tiles on the floor of the gallery.  Through the audience's repeated walking over that floor, the temporary preservation of images and notes is disrupted through physical wear.  Futura will offer the international premiere of this piece, which will have future presentations and audience erosion in its process-oriented extension of archivality coupled with inevitable loss.

Brendan Fernandes’ work investigates the concept of authenticity as an ideological construct used by both dominant and subordinate cultures to their own ends. Definitions of “authenticity” shape cultural experience, and thus, the formation of identity.  In his recent work he explores the dilemmas and codes created by language through ethnicity and sub-culture, where the artist specifically looks at how vernacular can be learned and then forgotten once removed from its place of origin. 

 Katie Holten’s work addresses the relationship between and among nature, social construction and memory. The New York-based Irish artist directs our attention to physical and conceptual objects and phenomena that are often overlooked.  At the root of Holten’s practice is a love of drawing.  At Futura, she presents a drawing installation that manifests her deepening curiosity about the conditions by which specific natural materials (such as weeds, twigs and stones) both emerge from and return to culture.  She will also paint the gallery walls Cosmic Turquoise, the “average” color of the universe incorrectly calculated by astrophysicists at Johns Hopkins University.  The painted walls will serve as the “ground” on which the drawing installation will take form. 

Since the beginning of his career, Robert Melee has sought to relocate formal debates about Western art historical tradition in the psychological realm of the suburban home.   For example, Melee’s Mobile is not your typical chandelier. It is an assortment of household items, craft and kitsch, a clash of abstract beauty and the grotesque. In the video projection, This Is For You Backdrop, Melee compresses ten years of documented footage shot on at least three camera formats; color, black and white and super-8 film, from encounters with lovers, friends and family into a 20-minute loop.

In David Scanavino's work, the daily Czech newspaper Blesk is returned to pulp from its newstand form. Text and image are processed  back into ink and pigment by the artist's hand. He then uses these elements to create site-specific wall forms that mirror the original scale of the paper.  Content is removed but not erased. Scanavino will make one work for each day of his residency for a total of 22 pieces. Installed next to each other these works will create an archive of this specific moment.

Xaviera Simmons works in a range of media including photography, sculpture, installation, performance and sound. In this way, she constructs a visual language that incorporates the histories of portraiture, landscape, anthropology, and linguistics as they relate to art, science, theater and text. At Futura Gallery, Simmons will exhibit new photographic works that draw on the landscape of Trebesice as a site for a non-linear narrative as well as a site-specific text based installation that uses the visual vernacular of everyday hand-painted street signage as a new means to look at visual constructions of the poetic. Simmons will also include video work produced in New York.

Finally, Video NY presents work by sixteen NYC video artists selected by the participating artists and the curator.  The video artists are: Michael Paul Britto, Nanna Debois Buhl, Jonathan Ehrenberg, Ezra Johnson, Kate Gilmore, Tommy Hartung, Jayson Keeling, Richard Mosse, Marilyn Minter, Mark Orange, Chloe Peine, Viva Ruiz, Diana Shpungin, Elisabeth Subrin, and Joey Weiss.

The year-round exhibition plan of FUTURA is supported by:
Ministerstvo kultury ČR, Magistrát hl.m. Prahy

Thanks to: Imarmitaliani, Culture Ireland

Main media partners:
Radio Wave, Umělec,

Media support:
Pragueout, Artmap, Artyčok.tv, Radio 1

Supported by the Central Bohemian district commissioner MUDr.David Rath fund