Alicja Knast, Culture Manager from Upper Silesia in Poland. She has also worked abroad as a scholarship holder and lecturer. She has been the curator of many Polish museums and exhibitions and is a member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Since January 2021, she has been the general director of the National Gallery in Prague.
Dear General Director, you come from Upper Silesia, which used to be a melting pot of different cultures. What does that mean for you in terms of your vision for the Czech National Gallery?
I am proud to be a Silesian and to deepen my understanding of this Upper Silesian melting pot by living and working in the Czech Republic. I grew up in Rybnik, where the influence of Czech culture is stronger than in Katowice, for example. It is present in the language but also in our traditions and landscape. Borders are not where they are on the map or where we claim they are. Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” is much more applicable to the attitude and actions of our ancestors in the first half of the 20th century than to us who are using the internet, booking cheap flights and living in the Schengen Area. It is very humbling and inspirational. Looking at the creative processes and the art scene is even more revealing. Were it not for financial reasons and forms of public support which are tied to a country’s budget, artists would be even less place – bound. These two phenomena – the liquid modernity of the 20th–21st centuries and artistic creativity – helped me to create a vision for the NGP which focuses more on encouraging people to keep discovering something new in the visual arts, and not just relying on templates from the handbooks.
You have been running the National Gallery Prague since the start of the year and you have experience as a Cultural Manager. What links with company management do you see here, and how can culture and business enrich each other?
The rules are the same. In every healthy organisation, all tezams need to participate in the development of a strategy and to get help during its realisation. Agreeing on the tools that are used along the way is more important in the gallery than in the corporate world. But in both settings, communication is what keeps us on the right path. This has become very difficult because of the pandemic and having to meet online. Some team members have not even met their director in person yet because they are encouraged to work from home and limit the risk of infection.
Historically, the National Gallery was founded with the aim to improve declining public taste. How are you meeting this objective now?
Following on from Pablo Picasso’s saying that “every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up” – and several other bold thinkers about art and creativity – we have changed our ways of looking at the appreciation of the visual arts. Everyone has the capacity to be enriched by art; the question is, how do we, curators and moderators of artistic life, make it truly memorable and relevant. I do have wonderful memories of bringing very difficult pieces of conceptual art to an audience which were not composed of art critics or art historians. Perhaps a music analogy will be more illustrative here. Everybody has their own musical preferences, excluding the 4 percent of the population who have a neurological disorder called amusia. The remaining 96 percent can appreciate music and change their genre preferences at least a few times in their lifetime. It is all about exposure; not necessarily about the richness of one’s vocabulary and ability to talk about it. The same goes for the visual arts. Our goal is to facilitate access to the collections. During a pandemic, we update our plans and means of reaching our audiences, but that is for another discussion.
The gallery has extensive collections of visual arts which are hidden from visitors’ eyes today. What new forms of collection presentation do you use to stay in touch with art lovers?
Being relevant to today’s audiences is probably the broadest answer to that question. We should not distinguish between young people who can access digital content and older people choosing analogue ways to participate in our events. Since the beginning of the pandemic, senior members of the public have had to become digitally literate and remain in touch with the outside world and their loved ones. This has helped them to learn new skills, which are no longer bound to a demographic. If you had asked me this question two years ago, my answer would have been different, with less emphasis on the importance of digital content. We are now experimenting with mixing platforms, disciplines (e.g. ballet and exhibition space) and tools.
Thank you for the interview.
Text: redakce
Foto: archiv NGP (Zuzana Bönisch, Serghei Gherciu)
