Oleg Kulik, Family of Future, 2000-06, photography (photo: City Gallery Prague)

The exhibition project Narušitelé hranic [Crossing Borders] brings into focus the problem of (artistic) identity. Over the last two hundred years, the process of seeking and finding new artistic standpoints has been closely linked with the anticipation of a loosening of traditional bonds and dogmas in all areas of social life: aesthetic, ethical, ethnic, and political. By the 19th century at the latest the artist became a subject active on a multinational level, striving to apply individual approaches to solving his problems, artistic and social alike.

While the modern artist sees himself as an avant-gardist exploring new roads towards genuine knowledge, in his turn the artist of today is a radical individualist who does not claim for himself any right to the absolute truth. Rather, he or she is willing to manipulate their identity, to assume the identity of others only to cast it away again, or to pose themselves questions which may appear to have been long answered.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain, which coincided in time with an explosive outset of globalization, artists in the parts of the world to the east of the former political and military divide experienced an opening of a "road leading to the world". They have quickly engaged in overcoming their previous ties to the defunct system of "real socialism", and embarked on a voyage of discovery of the continuously changing pluralist identity of globalized reality. In the process, they have evolved into persistent "trespassers", and thereby also into typical representatives of our age.