Jiří Suchánek – Around

Gallery 3 / 7. 6. – 29. 7. 2023
Artist: Jiří Suchánek (CZ)
Curators: Adéla Machová a Jan Krtička

Jiří Suchánek (1979, CZ) works with electroacoustic composition, sound composition, interactive installation and develops his own software for artistic installations as a sonification inter-domain mediator. In his works we can often find the connection of sound, light, sculpture, electronics, coding, always to a carefully chosen environment. He focuses on the moment of listening and is interested in specific places. He often places sound installations in unconventional spaces such as caves, astronomical observatories, footbridges, bushes, etc. He is interested in the durability of electronic media in different climates and new forms of communication of multimedia works. The main point of his artistic work is a sound, which refers to the environment around us.

For Gallery 3 Jiří Suchánek prepared a sound symphony of cold materials, where concrete and metal define each other in a shared space (Around, 2023). He found this place on the industrial entrance ramp to the gallery. He surveys his chosen environment and mediates the structures of the surrounding world through personal sonic experience. He refers to the dormant sounds around us, the hidden resonances of materials that we only need to want to discover. Hearing brings the activation of an audio-visual cognition, as theorist Marshall McLuhan describes this perception. Through sound, our other senses and emotions are activated. Through the artistic intervention, sound becomes an idea, a consciousness, an independent existence.

Jiří Suchánek studied Video – Multimedia – Performance at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology. He completed a foreign internship at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague (NL). During his doctoral studies at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno he focused on the problems of sonification and aesthetics of data mapping, where he defended a thesis “Sonification in musical composition and sound art” in 2021. Since 2009, he has been working as an assistant professor at the Department of Audiovisual Technology at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology. In 2020 he founded the association SVITAVA – transmedia art lab, z.s., which is dedicated to education and creation in the transmedia field.