This exhibition was organized and circulated by TIFF.Curated by Piers Handling and Noah Cowan.

Introduction by the Art Movement, producers, Kateřina Riley and Markéta Matoušková

In 2011, we fell into a reverie that it would be great to see international film exhibition projects not just in Paris, London, Vienna or New York, but also in Prague – to present selected icons of world cinematography to the local public as well. We are pleased that, after the 2014 exhibition of Tim Burton, the Art Movement association can introduce Czech viewers to the significant and globally respected Canadian director, David Cronenberg. They will have the opportunity to peek inside his filmic mind via photographs, sketches, drawings, props or rare, unseen film clips, and to watch both his early and iconic films in a specially built cinema. Human developments and transformations go hand in hand with rather disturbing ideas and visions of the viewers themselves, often taking us to the world of our own wishes or fears, which we never express...

You can also look forward our future exhibition projects from the world of film, which we have already begun preparing for you on an intense pace.

We wish you an inspiring experience!

Art Movement

www.artmovement.cz

Introduction by the Prague City Gallery Director, Magdaléna Juříková

The exhibition of the Canadian filmmaker, David Cronenberg, who entered film history with his surreal imagery and science fiction subjects, will rank among the most notable 2016 events in Prague City Gallery. The Gallery is thus developing on its previous cooperation with the non-profit organization Art Movement in the highly successful project “Tim Burton and His World”, which became the most visited cultural event in the Czech Republic in 2014.

The outstanding Canadian director ranks among artists blessed with abundant artistic imagination, which is the main basis of this planned project devoted to his lifetime oeuvre. Cronenberg’s surrealist visions, accompanying the action stories of his films with their characteristic sci-fi atmosphere, will be presented with authentic artefacts and models created for the individual movies, and dynamic audio-visual elements. The filmmaking career of Cronenberg often starts with interpreting evolutionary ideas and with how they have been influencing the human population. The exhibition even includes such subjects as human sexuality and its consequences, and preserving one’s own identity, and it closely follows the director’s intimate relationship with science and science fiction.

DAVID CRONENBERG: EVOLUTION
Curators Piers Handling a Noah Cowan

TIFF’s first major original exhibition, “David Cronenberg: Evolution”, parallels David Cronenberg’s evolution as a filmmaker with his longstanding fascination with the possibilities and perils of human evolution itself. Curated by TIFF Director & CEO, Piers Handling, and Artistic Director, Noah Cowan, and divided into three major sections that provide a loosely chronological overview of Cronenberg’s career, the exhibition traces the development of the director’s evolutionary themes across his filmography through more than 300 original artifacts, visionary designs, and rare and unseen footage.

WHO IS MY CREATOR?

The first section of the exhibition examines Cronenberg’s early films – from the early short, Stereo, to his major breakthrough, Videodrome – and emphasizes his protagonists’ searches for father figures as they are confronted by new, often terrifying evolutionary possibilities. The section also explores how this patriarchal search for mastery is accompanied by a corresponding loss of control over subjects’ bodies and sexual impulses, and the sociopolitical resonance of Cronenberg’s exploration of issues like virology and reproductive rights.

WHO AM I?

Covering Cronenberg’s “middle period”, from Videodrome to eXistenZ, this section examines how Cronenberg’s characters extend their renegade evolutionary experiments to their own bodies and selves, whether via science and technology, drugs, art, or sex.

A special space devoted to Naked Lunch traces Cronenberg’s affinities for other important 20th-century thinkers — among them, naturally, William S. Burroughs.

WHO ARE WE?

Beginning with Spider and coming up to the present with Maps to the Stars, this third section sees Cronenberg’s protagonists move beyond their private odysseys and into the social world.

At the exhibition exit, a screening room projects Cronenberg’s chilling, meta-critical autobiographical shorts reflecting the artist’s anxieties about evolution, mortality, and his own artistic identity.