Category: Exhibition

Theses 25 is an exhibition showcasing the final projects of graduates from the Faculty of Multimedia Communications at Tomas Bata University in Zlín. It offers a glimpse into the world of emerging art, design, and media. This year marks the eighth edition of the event, presenting the work of students from 13 different art studios – ranging from graphic and industrial design to photography, animation, film, and fashion design.

The exhibition is once again spread across three locations in Zlín – the university G18 gallery, the functionalist building Kolektivní dům, and the Rectorate of Tomas Bata University, which will also host the official opening. The vernissage will take place on Tuesday, June 24 at 6:00 PM and will offer the first opportunity to explore the diverse approaches, themes, and formats explored by the graduates in their projects.

We’re in a rush. It seems that every day passes too quickly. Where can we find peace? Is there a space that forces us to slow down, lets us breathe, and allows us to perceive ourselves and our surroundings? Can an exhibition be such a space? 

“Third places” – unassuming but still important corners outside of our homes and obligations. These are the cafés on the corner, benches in the park, community centers, or galleries full of stories. Spaces that connect, bring people together, and give them a chance to inspire and share. Often staying in the background, this time they step into the spotlight – ready to become a place where familiar faces meet and strangers become friends. The exhibition, subtitled Where We Meet, symbolizes the coming together of thoughts, a celebration of creativity and human stories, whether in digital or physical space. It is not only a presentation of works by young talents from around the world but also an invitation to search for your own “third place” – a refuge where you can experience design and coexist. 

Best of ’25: Where We Meet presents unique designer works that have made it to the top spots in the 16th edition of the Best in Design international competition in 2025. From May 8 to May 23, 2025, the gallery becomes a platform for dialogue, connecting young creators, space, and you. 

Curators: Bára Kolondrová, Eliška Janečková 

The international craft-oriented design competition Rings on Water is a platform for confronting new works seeking inspiration in traditional crafts, which has been organised by the Slovak Centre for Folk Art Production at regular two-year intervals since 2000.

The mission of the competition is to develop a dialogue about traditional values, their preservation and innovation in contemporary crafts, applied arts and design. The aim is to highlight the need for the transformation of craft, possible intersections into design and to initiate collaborations between craftspeople and professional designers. The ÚLUV is based on the conviction that craft-oriented design, highlighting the culture of handmade utilitarian and decorative objects, is a driving force for innovation also in the field of traditional craftsmanship.

In the open call for the current 12th edition of the competition, professional designers and university students have submitted their works in a separate section A, taking into account craft approaches in their contemporary designs or using tradition in a broader sense as inspiration for experimental design. In the next section B, artisans and traditional producers of artisanal products with regard to the possibilities of serial reproducibility are presented, emphasising the functional, aesthetic and ecological aspects of the products in their work.

It is also important for ÚĽUV to support designers at the stage of their professional formation in secondary schools with an artistic focus, which is why the competition provides them with space in a separate section C, where they submit works inspired by the practices or patterns of traditional craftsmanship, made from natural and, to a lesser extent, alternative materials.

Among the 234 entries, an international jury of experts selected 83 artists whose works will be presented at the Rings on Water 2024 competition show.

The exhibition presents the output of a pedagogical project that focused on the process and tools in the typography course where students design in the face of rapidly evolving tools using powerful, generative AI. The aim was not so much to confront the abilities of the human hand and imagination with the current possibilities of artificial intelligence as a contest in search of a winning author, but to present the width of the spectrum with which the contemporary graphic designer can work, ranging from the minimum assistance of digital tools to the maximum, which is currently the so-called strong artificial intelligence. At every point in this process of “mechanisation”, however, there is always a need for human, creative intervention. This exhibition attempts to present these moments with examples of assignments typical of the field of typography. We have deliberately chosen the assignments to include the levels considered to be symptoms of human creative behaviour: visual puns, metaphors, the use of optical illusion, the pursuit of self-expression. 

The emphasis on the procedural level of the discussion of the graphic designer’s work and so-called AI is underlined by both the interactive elements of the exhibition and the planned workshops on calligraphy and AI tools in the accompanying programme.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday 11 December 2024 at 6pm at the G18 Gallery, Štefánikova 5670.

Hobby market, do-it-yourself production. The academic year 2024/2025 will be opened in the G18 gallery by the international traveling exhibition DESIGN x HOBBY, which motivated product design students to raise the quality of DIY production to a new level. 

The DESIGN x HOBBY project will present the projects of young designers from three universities from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, which respond to the challenges of DIY design and present possible solutions through accessible, but at the same time functionally and aesthetically attractive designs.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, September 25, 2024 at 6 PM with an opening speech by co-curators Vít Jakubíček and Elena Farkašová. The projects will then be available to view until 29 November 2024 during normal opening hours MON–THURS, 1–6 PM.

The exhibition, at which we present graduate work from our 13 art studios to the public, is being held at three locations this year – in the university G18 gallery, in the Kolektivní dům and at the TBU Rectorate. The opening of the Theses 24 exhibition will take place on Tuesday, June 25, from 6 PM. The exhibition itself will last until July 18, 2024.

Diploma theses will be on display for the first time at the exhibition. In three buildings, you will see works by more than 80 students from the studios of Animation, Audiovisual Arts, Arts Management, Fashion Design, Shoe Design, Glass, Digital Design, Game Design, Graphic Design, Product Design, Spatial Design, Industrial Design and Photography.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on June 25, 2024 from 6 PM in the building of the Rectorate of TBU (building U13, nám. T. G. Masaryka 5555). The opening is followed by an after-party in the courtyard of the U4 building (Univerzitní 2431), where the Hello Marcel concert will take place. Admission to the concert is free, you can save the event time thanks to the Facebook event.

The exhibition will be open daily from 10 AM to 6 PM, from 26. 6.  to 18. 7., including weekends and holidays. Entry to the exhibition is free.

The future is often seen as a science fiction structure competing with human characteristics, rather than a development of predetermined outcomes. The purpose of its exploration by designers is not to predict the inevitable, but to discover ways of influencing future events.

Inclusive, resilient and innovative design has a place in the future of our society. Design is ubiquitous, transforming current designs into future solutions that impact the quality of our lives. Let’s explore its place in the future with the finalists of the 15th edition of the international Best in Design competition.

For fifteen years, Best in Design has provided a space for new talent to explore ways to influence the direction of design and everyday life. Which themes and approaches do they highlight? How do they see the world and its direction? The exhibition Future is Best of ’24!: A Place in the Future brings together visual communication, industrial product design, service design and textile design. It opens a space for encounters, discussions and reflection on how to create and support design for the future we want.

The finalists of the 15th edition of the competition will be presented from 9 to 24 May at the G18 Gallery.

Exhibition curator: Kristína Mlynárová

G18 Gallery invites visitors to the world of Czechoslovak cinematography not only of the 1960s. The exhibition “Jaroslav Kučera Laboratory” will show the work of the cameraman as creative and artistic. The opening will take place on Monday 19 February 2024 at 6 PM at Štefánikova 5670, Zlín.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is the work of Jaroslav Kučera, who is inherently one of the most important creators of Czechoslovak cinema in the second half of the twentieth century. He is known as a progressive cinematographer who determined the visual form of a number of Czech films (including Diamonds of the Night, Daisies, Fruit of Paradise, All My Good Countrymen and Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet).

“The exhibition builds on previous projects about the (not only) Czech New Wave cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, which came out of an extensive and completely unknown estate that includes photographs, negatives, slides, family films, never-published daily works, test footage (revealing and post-production editing) and other film materials on 16 mm and 35 mm tape,” says Kateřina Svatoňová, co-curator of the exhibition.

Jaroslav Kučera’s archive is both very varied in terms of material and media, and a perfect “textbook” of various film techniques and possibilities of experimentation with classic film material. For this reason, students from various disciplines of the Faculty of Film and Television Studies at the University of Technology in Zlin were invited to participate in the exhibition, and together they thought about Kučera’s individual media practices and uncovered his ways of working.

“The exhibition of Kučera’s work at the Faculty of Multimedia Communications brings new possibilities compared to previous projects. The aim of this exhibition is therefore not only to present Kučero’s work, but to create a specific laboratory and space for communication – between the past and the present, between photography and film, and between students of different disciplines who are preparing the exhibition together,” adds Svatoňová.

The experimental laboratory will be complemented by the creative workshop G18 EduLab, which was supported by the National Recovery Plan. Visitors of different age groups will have the opportunity to explore the behind-the-scenes work of the cameraman from different angles and through a gallery case. In the first week, the exhibition will also be complemented by an accompanying programme for the students of FMK UTB in Zlin and the public; we will publish the complete accompanying program on our website and social media.

The exhibition will launch with an opening on 19 February 2024 at 18:00 at Štefánikova 5670, Zlin. The exhibition itself will then run from 20 February to 18 April 2024, always open Monday-Thursday from 1 to 6 PM.

The last exhibition of 2023 will present a selection of the best works of the Hungarian art colony Art Colony Cered. The exhibition will showcase a curated selection of the best sculptures, installations, prints, textiles and photographs from the recent themed summer symposia that take place annually in the Hungarian village of Cered. Founding figures from the older generation – conceptual and textile artist Cecilia Kun and graphic designer László Sánta – will be presented, as well as other artists – sculptor Pál Németh, conceptual artists Szabina Péter and Eszter Pálik, photographer Agóta Krnács, Slovak sculptor and coordinator Jozef Suchoža.

Art Colony Cered is an artistic and intellectual creative workshop founded in 1996 in Hungary, which aims to strengthen the social, sociological, economic and cultural role of contemporary art, not only in metropolises but also in regional peripheries. It seeks to preserve local folklore wealth, but also to foster new creative, technological and material processes and to present important artists in joint meetings, exhibition projects and printed publications. The connection between the Zlín environment and the Hungarian art association Art Colony Cered is greater than it may seem. For decades, one of the teachers of the FMC TBU, the author of the objects Vladimír Kovařík, has been coming to Cered, and many of the aforementioned artists have been participating in the Panta Rhei symposium, which our faculty has been organising for almost two decades.

The curators behind the selection are Jozef Suchoža (Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica) and Miroslav Zelinský (FMK UTB in Zlín).

The opening of the exhibition Best of Art Colony Cered will take place on Wednesday, 6 December 2023 at 6 pm.
The exhibition will then run from 7 December 2023 to 1 February 2024. Admission to the gallery is free for all, opening hours are Monday to Thursday 1-6 pm.

 

We will start the new academic year with an exhibition of Latin American posters entitled ¡IMPRESIONES DE AMÉRICA LATINA! – Posters and Prints. In addition to artists from South American countries, the exhibition will also provide greater insight into printing techniques, especially screen printing.

The technique of screen printing appeared in China as early as the first century AD. However, it declined in the USA and Europe as a result of technological developments that led to the emergence of faster and more efficient offset printing. One of the countries where screen printing continued to thrive was Mexico and surrounding countries.

Mexico put itself on the graphic design map in 1968 with the visual style of the Summer Olympics. It was during this period that the Biennials of Graphic Design were created in Europe, specifically in Warsaw and Brno. Graphic design did not reach its peak until the 1990s with the creation of the Mexican International Poster Biennial.

“The exhibition will feature more than 60 posters and limited edition prints by professionals from Mexico’s classic generation, not only from the 1990s, bringing cultural, social, political and commercial overlap to the gallery. Visitors will have the opportunity to experience a selection of the most important graphic designers from Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and other countries,” says Eduardo Barrera Arambarri, graphic designer and one of the exhibition’s curators.

In addition to the exhibited posters, the exhibition also includes a screen-printing workshop that will introduce visitors to the authentic atmosphere of the Latin American culture of local printers. As part of the accompanying program, there will be a lesson on color separation for screen printing and an expert lecture for the public on various printing techniques.

The opening will take place on Wednesday 27 September 2023 at 18:00, with an introductory speech by the curators doc. Mgr. A. Pavel Noga, ArtD. (Head of the Graphic Design Studio) and Eduardo Barrera Arambarri (PhD student of the Graphic Design Studio). The exhibition will run from 28 September to 24 November 2023, from Monday to Thursday, 1-6 PM. Admission is free for all.

 

 

Eduardo himself will tell you more about the exhibition in the following video:

 

 

 

The exhibition was made possible with the financial support of the Ministry of Culture. Thank you!