Vít Havránek
Vít Havránek, Prague, 15 October 2025
“As a curator, I’m fond of working with existing sets of rules.”
The Czech art theorist, exhibition-maker, and longtime tranzit.cz director Vit Havranék is frequently quoted as an expert on the “postwar avant-garde.” In the conversation here, filmed in one of the lecture halls at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, this fact soon leads to the questions of whether the war ever actually ended and to what extent a European perspective on this could be called “provincial.” Havránek singles out an exhibition by Friedensreich Hundertwasser in Prague as the experience that initiated his engagement with art. He speaks of his interest in the phenomenon of a “near-religious trust” that one can employ in art as a counter-reality. And he describes the strategies he employs as an internationally active curator as a game with rules, with strong references to literature and film—as a type of staging where the genre “exhibition” interrogates its own traditional, economic, political, and social implications.
“As a curator, I’m fond of working with existing sets of rules.”
The Czech art theorist, exhibition-maker, and longtime tranzit.cz director Vit Havranék is frequently quoted as an expert on the “postwar avant-garde.” In the conversation here, filmed in one of the lecture halls at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, this fact soon leads to the questions of whether the war ever actually ended and to what extent a European perspective on this could be called “provincial.” Havránek singles out an exhibition by Friedensreich Hundertwasser in Prague as the experience that initiated his engagement with art. He speaks of his interest in the phenomenon of a “near-religious trust” that one can employ in art as a counter-reality. And he describes the strategies he employs as an internationally active curator as a game with rules, with strong references to literature and film—as a type of staging where the genre “exhibition” interrogates its own traditional, economic, political, and social implications.