Profile: Alexander Peroutka

Alexander Peroutka is an artist, curator and writer who graduated in 2006 from the Academy of Fine Arts Prague and received his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Technical University in Brno. In 2005, Peroutka was a fellow at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. His diploma work, Who Are We? (2006), in which a ventilator seems to react to open web texts ona PC screen, explored Czech online magazines and the way they channel discussions of identity and gender in the Czech media. Other recent projects, such as How do you like Sweden? (2007-2009), Collective Errors (2012), and Invisible Economy (2012), explore community relations within a local economy.
 

The exhibition Blind Spot (Slepá skrvna, curated by Milan Mikulaštík, June 7 – July 16, 2013, NTK Gallery, Prague) explored utopian “non-places” in urban spaces as well as within mental and social environments. Peroutka’s project for this show, Strike?, alludes to the student and peasant protests in Japan during the 1960s and ’70s, whose radicalness exceeded that of similar movements in the West. Peroutka contrasts the urgency of these and related protests at the time with our current situation where it seems harder and harder to mobilize people to take their futures into their own hands. In Strike?, a siren is activated every twenty minutes. In between these calls, the installation is filled with sounds recorded on the streets of Prague.