Virtual Biennale Prague 2017: Selection

The international exhibition is held by the Association of Applied Graphics and Graphic Design in cooperation with the Altán Klamovka Prague gallery from the Czech Republic already since 2007. The international poster exhibition has two categories – professionals and visual communication students. Virtual biennale Prague is dedicated year after year to topical subjects and invites young students of graphic design, as well as professional graphic designers, from all around the world to provide their visual representations. This year we decided to present a selection from previous years. Current Exhibition is prepared by Lenka Sýkorová, Karel Míšek and Li Xu and has already been presented in the Gallery of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology in Shanghai in China in September of this year. This is a collection of posters from each show of Virtual Biennale. We primarily focus on the winner posters.

More: www.mzv.cz/shanghai/cz/udalosti/virtualni_bienale_praha_predstavilo_v.html

In 2007, graphic designer Karel Míšek and I came up with the idea to organize this international exhibition of graphic design in two categories. The interconnection of the virtual Internet environment and the digitalization of the given theme with a real presentation in an actual gallery made it possible to create an international exhibition with minimal costs and minimal preparation time. The original idea was also to point out the hurriedness of our era. This is why Virtual Biennale Prague has been held every year (with the exception of 2013), although the word “biennale” means a two-year periodicity. Every year, participants receive an e-mail with the assigned topic, which they must elaborate within a very short time before uploading their work to the website.1 Then the organisers process the contributions into an exhibition held in the Altán Klamovka Gallery and prepare materials for the international jury. The exhibition is not just a confrontation between the exhibited artists’ posters on the given topic, but also a contest in two categories – professional graphic designers and art college students. The artists are invited to participate by e-mail.

Graphic designers made a black-and-white poster on a given theme. The Biennale themes (E-mail Sex, Fast Food, Global Crisis, Discrimination, China, Corruption, Information War, Friendship, Future) reflect topical social issues, and the graphic concept of exhibited artworks ranges from poignantly humorous to formally illustrative all the way to very critical. Since graphic design is nowadays often reduced to commercials, these exhibitions help to rehabilitate visual communication (posters) as a peculiar and full-fledged way of cultural communication. The black-and-white version is required not as some kind of restriction but to avoid exaggerated aestheticization, which often hinders a stronger accentuation of the idea of the artwork. Every year’s result is surprising. Last year’s theme, Future, interconnected 378 artists from 31 countries around the world and 65 art universities.

Lenka Sýkorová