Contain[era] – The European Mobility and Materialized Information Transfer in the Post-internet Era

Site-specific and non-specific, the conflict between information reality and virtuality, global versus national culture, and central Europe as an equal part of the European Union – these are the themes of an international exhibition project Contain[era] that took place in the second half of 2015 in eight European countries. Eight shipping containers were turned into mobile galleries, each providing a space for a multimedia exhibition of one contemporary artist from one of the participating countries. Eight exhibitions, each focused on the notion of information transfer and depiction of national cultural heritage, traveled on a circle route connecting all participating cities, presenting the artistic information unmodified, undistorted by local influences. When the circle was complete, all the containers gathered in the coordinating city, Prague, to form one large combined exhibition. A symposium was held, bringing together members of the professional public involved in each of the participating cities, as well as a rich accompanying program for public. The third and final phase of the project consisted of individual exhibitions of participating artists, in the partnered galleries in the participating cities, a breaking moment in which the original hypothesis were challenged and further discussed. The outcomes of the individual exhibitions, both in the mobile galleries and in the brick-and-mortar galleries, as well as the collective final exhibition and a symposium, became a basis for the theoretical phase of the project – various texts, essays, critics, documentaries, exhibition catalogues, and many more. Last but by no means least, the project established a network of personal relations in the area of one of the fundamental pillars of the united Europe – European culture, unique and united in its diversity.