Residency: David Fesl

David Fesl (*1995, lives and works in Prague) has been studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague since 2014 (Jiří Kovanda, Vladimír Skrepl). He was on the internship at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Desing (Dominika Lang, Edith Jeřábková, Céline Duval, David Maljkovic).

His work has a distinctive poetics, is always ambiguous, and thus works as a challenge to interpretation based on the dispositions and the audience’s experience. It can open up to meaningful wealth, thus speaking out to contemporary questions, or acting with its sophisticated formal and material solutions. He is interested in the relationship between art, craft and design and the poetics of self-criticism of the media. Fesl also works conceptually with the text and very successfully implements them into his sophisticated installations. „His work is characterized by a certain inaccuracy when inaccurate does not mean accidental. In spite of the possible enchantment of inexhaustible play with the forms and relationships of found materials, the question is how far Fesl’s objects can still be perceived through the “nostalgic” poetics of the material world. Aren’t they, in the end, the imprints of the fragments of our social body, the metaphor of its nerve endings, the digital extensions and, above all, the lability of all our complicated constructions, of which we are less and less aware?“ Fesl also works as an exhibition architect for other artist and thus engages in a discourse of cooperation. In 2017 he founded the Writing club for visual artists and a year later the “migrant” Studio of Photography in Prague. In 2017 he was awarded a Josef Hlávka prize.

His work was the part of the exhibition: Oh it´s easy… in Castlefield Gallery in Manchester (2018) and DOX in Prague, Close Relations in City Surfer Office (2018), The Freelance DJ in Kabinet T in Zlín (2018), Everything Means Nothing To Me in UM Gallery (2018), Against Nature in the National Gallery in Prague (2016) and OFF Biennale (2015).

Over the course of his residency, he will carry out research on local jewellers’ workshops – official, domestic, hidden, and forgotten. During his stay, he will work on the concept for a performative exhibition in which objects/ jewellery will be presented in a more comprehensive form and in a broader context extending into design and styling. During the second half of the residency, he will focus on joinery workshops and on improvised forms of exhibitions at a local archaeological and volcanological museums. He will draw inspiration from these in creating stands/carriers and the whole architecture of his planned exhibit in Prague (2019).

The project is realized with the support of the City of Prague and Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic