The Triennial of Contemporary Central European Culture and Art is a format prepared by the Olomouc Museum of Art as part of the programme of the Central European Forum (SEFO). The Museum has long been researching the geographic and significantly unstable region of Central Europe and focusing its acquisition activities on it. The Triennial is an opportunity to cross the boundary of the history of old and modern art towards contemporary art, without which reflection on the phenomenon of Central Europe would not be complete.

The SEFO 2024 Triennial is a continuation of the first edition, which took place in 2021 and was subtitled UNIVERSUM. Its aim was to search for and examine possible connections and fixed points in the structure of the world we live in. The general validity of the temporal and spatial dimension of UNIVERSUM is concretised in the SEFO 2024 Triennial, whereby time and space are grasped through art-historical categories. We observe art, architecture, and their environments in real time, but with an emphasis on the modes of historicity and interpretive frameworks that are, or have been, attributed to them.

The timeline in retrospect and in prospects for the future offers many MOMENTS when the fixed points that are chosen, analysed, and named lose their validity and stability, when they undergo a change of perception, acceptance, or even crisis. The objects we focus on in the SEFO 2024 Triennial are represented by a set of terms borrowed from the art historian, theorist, and curator Octavian Eşanu. His triad Monument-Document-Mockument is adapted and measured in the Triennial concept by the current concept of the moment.

MOMENTS do not represent only impermanent points on the timeline for us, they also allow us to explore and compare experiences, long processes, and critical turns. The Triennial wants to work with those moments when we touch our own history and memory and when we construct their image through art and architecture.

- MONUMENTS, in the Triennial concept, represent the supposed certainties of the past and the present. Let us imagine memorials, monuments, and entire protected complexes as products of social agreements or historical constructs, let us examine objects that are worthy and unworthy of protection, tangible and intangible, materialised memory and its care or lack thereof.

- The tools we use to systematise the knowledge of memory (and at this point we touch directly on the essence of the organising institution) are covered by the term DOCUMENT.

- The instrument of the experiment is MOCKUMENT, which introduces mystification or irony into the interpretive processes, questioning myths based on the reality of previously unambiguous facts.

Museum of Art Olomouc — Museum of Modern Art