Jindřich Štreit | (Un)known photographs 1978-1989

Jindřich Štreit | (Un)known photographs 1978-1989

30. 6. 2016 – 30. 10. 2016
Museum of Modern Art 

EXHIBITION CONCEPT AND CURATORS | Štěpánka Bieleszová
EXHIBITION DESIGN | Marek Novák
GRAPHIC DESIGN | Petr Šmalec
PREPARATION OF EXHIBITS | Veronika Wanková
INSTALLATION | Jan Kutra, Vlastimil Sedláček, Filip Šindelář
PUBLIC RELATIONS | Petr Bielesz
EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMES | David Hrbek, Michaela Soukupová
TRANSLATION | Hana Havlíčková, Tomáš Havlíček, Adéla Horáková, Derek Paton
PROJECT PARTNER | The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Olomouc region, Institute of Creative Photography of the Silesian University in Opava, The City of Olomouc, Publishing house Fontána

The exhibition Jindřich Štreit / (Un)known Photographs 1978–1989 is being prepared to mark the anniversary of the birth of the most important Czech photographer; a man who has devoted his working life to the documentation of country life in the time of fading communism. His work has been presented at hundreds of solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. His photographs have been included in the collections of many distinguished international institutions (The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The International Centre of Photography, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and others). 

The exhibition covers over thirty years of Štreit’s documentary work which originated in the former Sudetenland and vividly describes life in the neglected Moravian border area. The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents the artist’s less known and probably as yet unpublished photographs, which were stored for a few decades in his own archive in Sovinec. The other part forms a separate appendix and presents a selection of his most famous photographs. 

The photographs were originally selected by the artist for an extraordinary project which was first presented in Bratislava in 1988 in the form of a twenty-metre-long band of tar paper densely covered by photographs. Due to the complexity of the theme the book was produced in cooperation with specialists from the Olomouc Museum of Art (Š. Bieleszová, L. Daněk, A. Šimková, G. Renotière) and the Institute of Creative Photography in the Faculty of Philosophy and Science at the Silesian University in Opava (V. Birgus).