Fotograf Magazine

The engagé transformation of public space in the City of Prague has been the focus of a number of art projects by Vladimír Turner (b. 1986), a graduate of the Center for Audiovisual Studies at the Czech national film school in Prague (FAMU), who is at the moment finishing his studies in Jiří David’s studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. Apart from controversial activities with the art group Ztohoven, Turner first made his mark as a solo artist with a highly personal and provocative self-portrait entitled Nevim coby (Ants in My Pants, 2007), depicting a series of subversive and socially unacceptable acts which he had committed. A subsequent project, a 2009 film entitled UFF, received attention in the media. In this piece, Turner monitored his various interventions into the urban landscape. In his further work, Turner more or less abandoned the music video-derived aesthetic of UFF, also employed in his 2008 documentary O mediální realitě (On Media Reality), reducing his post-production interventions to a minimum in favor of a straightforward and critical but not banal message. Although he occasionally produces purely aesthetic works drawing on his love of experimental film and video art, he finds truly creative potential most of all in political art, which to him – as both artist and dissatisfied citizen – constitutes an existential prerequisite of his work.