Welsh exhibition launches in Prague 

12-01-2012 

An exhibition created through the co-operation of Ffotogallery, Cardiff, and the University of Wales in Newport has opened in Prague.

The Silent Village is an innovative presentation of the events in connection with the tragic fate of the village of Lidice, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942.

The exhibition is derived from the film The Silent Village (1943) made by the British avant-garde film maker Humphrey Jennings only a few months after the razing of Lidice. Inspired by Viktor Fischl’s poem “The Dead Village”, Jennings found an analogy of Lidice in the village of Cwmgїedd in South Wales, and with the participation of mining families produced a version of the story of the Lidice massacre translated into a Welsh environment for the film. The exhibition sees contemporary artists Paolo Ventura, Peter Finnemore and the writer Rachel Trezise offer their response to the film and its theme in a series of black and white photographs, video and audio recordings and texts.

The exhibition was created through the co-operation of Ffotogallery, Cardiff, and the University of Wales in Newport. Exhibition curator, Russell Roberts, Professor of Photography at the European Centre for Photography Research at University of Wales, Newport comments:

“It is not whether art and fiction are suitable means to recover and represent such traumatic events but, more importantly, to discover their possibilities to ensure that we remember and to better understand how memory is made.”

The exhibition The Silent Village together with 10.35, an accompanying exhibition by Jan Kaplan, will run until 9 April 2012 at DOX, Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague.

An innovative presentation, The Silent Village



The video installation by Jan Kaplan entitled 10:35