Vladimir Havlík's 1980s Videos Recontextualized in Prague Exhibition

At Prague's Parallel Gallery, the exhibition "Yesterday" featured a collaborative installation by Barbora Klímová and Vladimir Havlík from June 4 to June 28, 2009. Klímová, a Brno-based artist and curator, curated three open-ended videos from Havlík's personal archive, which he had filmed in the early 1980s in his hometown of Olomouc. These videos depict youthful activities during an oppressive period, including Havlík cutting his own hair and scenes with a girlfriend, reflecting a provincial Czech underground with a patina reminiscent of 1970s Hippie culture. The show avoided nostalgia by framing the found material with shifting narratives, a strategy seen in works by other artists like Anri Sala, Hito Steyerl, Anca Benera, and Marysia Lewandowska, who analyze Communist pasts through visual archives. Havlík's films served as self-reflexive diaries, blending private and public elements with an avant-gardist optimism about media's liberating potential. Klímová mounted the videos on three TV monitors in loops across two gallery rooms, without titles or captions, to prevent literal interpretations, instead including short texts by Havlík in a brochure. The exhibition highlighted a "struggle over the archive," a political ritual familiar in former Eastern Bloc countries, emphasizing how archives can be subversive and poetic. Sven Spieker reviewed the show, noting its place among younger artists from former Eastern Bloc nations investigating decayed visual records of Communism.