Jiři David is a real event on the Central-European scene, and his work eludes all comparison. Whatever accidental analogies can be drawn with other artists owing to momentary association do not reveal conscious trends in David’s work. Jiři David is an artist who rejects the main paths, often preferring work that goes against the grain.

“I don’t know who I am, or what I want to express; I don’t know what I make and for whom; nor can I say what the point is, or where to search for the origins of the meanings in my work, as the meaning often undergoes transformation. It matters to me (I suspect) less and less who understands my works, and what they understand; this also goes for myself – I remain an unknown quantity to myself. After years of intensive professional work in art, somewhere in Central Europe, I have no concrete identity. Slowly, with a growing sense of doubt, I’m coming to the conclusion that this is nothing negative, but I still have no clue what to do with all of this” – the artist says.

According to Martin Dostal, the curator of the exhibition entitled Touch My Head  – the retrospective shows ‘what’s spinning around in Jiři David’s head.’ It presents David’s conceptual approach to art, communicating his thinking process – on every occasion fresh and containing the powerful individual attributes of the artist – regardless of the medium used. Through the language of photography, which is brought to the fore for this Krakow exhibition, the viewer comes to know the whole world of this Czech artist: his pains, joys and personal desires.

The exhibition is made up of a few parts. Its central element, and the core of the whole, is the ‘My Hostage’ series – an example of the kind of game Jiři David plays with his surrounding reality, games that border on perversity. These works created in 1998 reflect the political, social and cultural reality of the times, but have lost none of their timeliness. What’s more, they seem even more relevant to the reality we see today than they did when they were created.

The next part of the presentation of David’s work is a repetition of the ‘Bibionis’ installation sixteen years after the original; it is a conscious play between photography and conceptual activity, again visualizing thoughts which were going through the artist’s head at the time.

In the next series shown at the exhibition, ‘Sacharov Flat,’ David presents five photographs that he took recently in Andrei Sacharov’s apartment. They were taken when David was quartered in Moscow, in a space once belonging to the dissident. In ‘Sacharov Flat,’ a paraphrase of a series of weeping politicians (‘No Compassion’), Jiři David showed how twisted history could be: the home of the great oppositionist becomes a significant symbol in an era when not much in Russia has changed – only the form of the ‘tsardom.’ In David’s pictures the face of Putin weeping stares out from every corner of the apartment. In trademark fashion, the questions asked by the artist in these works which have no direct answers.

Krakow will feature the international premiere of ‘Sacharov Flat,’ while the first local premiere of the project took place in Prague, during the ‘Preliminary Retrospektive.’