Past Future
Oskar Helcel
Set of photographs showing the territory of Kazakhstan, the capital Astana (in 2019-2022 it was named Nur-Sultan), the area along Lake Aral, and the city of Baikonur in the adjacent space complex of the same name in the southwest of the country. This steppe area was chosen by the Soviet Union after World War II as the ideal location for a space and military-ballistic headquarters. Vast tracts of barren saline land were occupied and still serve as a base for space rocket launches.
These, for example, still carry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). Originally a classified spaceport site made available after the collapse of the USSR until the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it was an adventurous destination for space enthusiasts, especially from wealthier Western countries. Here, space heritage meets Islamic culture in the "Great Steppe", as Kazakhstan is nicknamed, and the theme of the relationship between heaven and earth is varied in the form of endless intersecting verticals and horizontals. Thus, contrasts resulting from the modern dualism of politics and religion erupt across the Kazakh landscape and architecture. The "sanctuaries" of these power structures are separated by thousands of years, yet they are strikingly similar. They exist side by side in a symbiosis of a kind of "former future," which will actively last until the Russian Federation builds its Vostochny Cosmodrome and, in 2050, terminates its space lease agreement with Kazakhstan.
Oskar Helcel is an audiovisual artist, photographer and performer. He graduated from the Department of Photography at FAMU in Prague in the studios of Markéta Kinterová and Hynek Alt. He has had several solo and group exhibitions as within Other Visions at PAF – Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art in Olomouc Gallery XY, 2022; Glajcha, Josef Sudek Studio, 2022; Tekoucí Dům, Jelení Gallery, Prague, 2020; Argumented Reality, online exhibition within The National Film Archive, 2021; Houses of Culture (togehter with Martin Netočný), Centre for Contemporary Art Prague, 2019.
Helcel received an honorable mention in the European art thesis competition START POINT Prize 2020. He is a co-founder and active member of the theatre group Akolektiv Helmut.
Under Construction
The performative video essay entitled Under Construction is a work loosely related to the author's diploma project It´s Buildable (2020). The thesis focused on the controversial new building at Masaryk Station in Prague and formally explored the possibilities of the then relatively new technology of deep fake video. In the current video essay, the author lets the architect of the entire project, Zaha Hadid (1950-2016), speak in her own fictional voice created with the help of artificial intelligence.
Through a speculative monologue, the architect reveals the complex mechanism of her repressed emotions. Doubts about her own work are mixed here with an eclectic defence of her career. An insight into the inner self of the now deceased "starchitect" takes place inside her nearly completed building, which seems to have become a labyrinth of her own making. She tries in vain to find her way out of it, and at the same time cannot detach herself from it. This internal emotional contradiction correlates with the issue of urban development and the privatisation of public space for the purpose of maximising profit, at the cost of negative impacts on the environment and the quality of life of the public.