Veronika Šrek Bromová From Prague to Chaos

A complicated period came around 2006, when my parents fell ill. I had to give up and clear out their apartment – overtaken by their illnesses – along with a studio my sister had vacated, all in a beautiful building in Vinohrady where I had spent most of the 1990s with my then-partner Doug, a Canadian. We ran a business together, a language school and a small graphic design studio; he introduced me to working with computers, and my nineties work might never have existed without him, but we split up around 2000... In the first-floor apartment at Chodská 13, I threw many parties with friends from the art world, and since I barely sold anything at the time – maybe once every few years – and my salary as head of a studio at the Academy of Fine Arts was not enough to live on, I basically couldn’t afford the rising rent... Eventually I let my parents have the apartment after they were evicted from their studio in Žižkov. I started using my grandmother’s small flat, where I had moved at eighteen after a fierce argument with my father, who kept trying to control me. In the meantime I had occasionally lent it for free to students in need, but in the end I had to let that go too. I was living there during my teaching years at the Academy, a period when I began living with the painter Martin Mainer and his daughters, 30 km from Prague in Limuzy. The whole economic situation – the privatization of buildings, the arrival of Western investors, mainly from Italy, which I watched unfold in Vinohrady – started transforming the reality of the past, when you could get by on very little. I was glad that the stagnant waters of the post-communist era were finally stirring, but financially I couldn’t keep up. I gradually moved in with Martin, and after we broke up I briefly returned to the small flat, and about a year later, thanks to a cottage near Polička, I met Ivan, who was helping me repair it – and from there we ended up living together, including clearing out my parents’ apartment. A knight who cut me free from the thicket, so to speak. Remembering all this, I feel grateful for everything he did for me: he offered me a home, I discovered a wonderful community of friends around Polička, and for eighteen years I could share his Chaos homestead. I feel joy at what we accomplished together – we adopted and raised two children, maintained a beautiful natural space, organized exhibitions and cultural events, workshops and concerts. Sadly, Ivan is now in a neurological intensive care unit with brain damage, half-paralyzed, with impaired speech, and I don’t know what will happen.

It was our small village vision of paradise – a floating, ever-changing community of volunteers, family, friends, artists, students, shamans, theorists, sociologists, historians, eccentrics and children, and animals. The volunteers came mainly through wwoof.cz – through this organization many seekers arrived who became and continue to be part of our family and community, helping to build and maintain our project. People looking for ways to live differently, a bit outside the system, close to nature, learning how to grow their own food and live and build sustainably – what people now call environmentally responsible living. It was sustainable mainly thanks to them, to me and my husband, and to all the good people who pitched in one way or another. I want to try going forward without the tedious bureaucracy of grants – we’ll see how it goes and whether I can manage on my own, because Ivan’s recovery will probably take a long time and I don’t know how things will turn out.

With grants from the town of Polička and the Czech Ministry of Culture, and once from the State Funds and once from the Agosto Foundation, we mainly ran the year-round cultural programmes of the Kabinet Chaos Gallery. I invited artists whose work resonated with our project and offered fresh perspectives on the theme of nature, along with related subjects. We organized summer gatherings of artists, historians and people who were inspiring both for artists and for local audiences. We opened up various topics that felt timely and stimulating – community, interspecies communication, journeys to little-explored places, rituals with an Aztec shaman. I invited people who worked therapeutically with the mind or the body, or both, and more. We started organizing children’s creative workshops – we enjoyed devising them together with my long-time friend Štěpánka Nikodýmová, who studied education and art and was interested in art made from waste; she’s brilliant with kids. Ivan originally organized punk festivals right at Chaos, but even he – fond as he was of Polička beer – grew tired of dealing with drunks who tried to linger after the events were over. So with my arrival, Chaos shifted towards art. We were inspired by the book Venkovy by the eco-sociologist Bohuslav Blažek and by Václav Havel’s ideas about civil society. My husband was very active in all kinds of local associations, especially nature conservation, as well as opposition political groups that offered fresher perspectives as an alternative to the entrenched local ODS, which had dominated for thirty years. Even before the current tragedy – the outcome of which remains unknown – we had wanted to scale back all our volunteering activities: I’m turning sixty this year, Ivan will soon be seventy. We ran the gallery from 2011, fifteen years on a volunteer basis. There may still be a few more exhibitions, but I definitely have no appetite for filling out forms and filing financial reports anymore. The ordeal of an audit by the Svitavy tax office, covering four years of our operations, which ended with no findings, rather killed my desire to deal with these things going forward. The local association Přespolní in nearby Lubná manages the programme and operation of Jiří Příhoda’s Archa, which also serves as a gallery, and several other friends from the area are trying their hand at similar things.

Some support can come in handy – for instance in the situation I’m going through right now. I have no idea yet what the Artist Status is actually for. It seems to me that just about anyone can apply. It probably needs to be better defined who actually qualifies as an artist – you should have something behind you... some track record. I don’t know, but what interests me is some kind of alternative taxation for unpredictable earnings. For example, my experience is that it’s better to downgrade yourself from artist to sole trader, because the tax burden is more manageable that way... When I occasionally sell a work from, say, the 1990s – something I’ve stored and looked after for thirty years – my experience is that I cross the VAT threshold, end up handing roughly half back to the state, get hit with huge advance payments, and again the stress on my head, which isn’t great with money. And so on. Everything gets incredibly complicated, and most artists simply aren’t wired for this. Some are good at business too, but I think the majority just want to create and not deal with the rest. If only there were a way to tax artists more humanely and simply, because what we do is special in every respect. I started thinking about giving up grant funding after the experience of an audit that lasted about nine months – we kept having to track things down and supply additional documents; it was a stressful period. It simply drains your joy and your desire to invest energy in anything. Writing the project proposal, when you know what you want and what it’s about, didn’t feel hard – it came naturally. One year I even managed the whole thing on my own, including the budget. Then I was thrown off when it all had to be done electronically, and because the application was essentially the same every year, I was used to leaving it to the last minute. Unfortunately I ended up stuck because the Ministry of Culture’s system didn’t work on Apple computers. I’m no genius – under stress it didn’t occur to me that I could try a different browser, and so on. There were probably some training sessions, but that’s not really my thing... The programme support was great and I’m grateful that we could do something cultural for our village and its surroundings. Sadly the local neighbours weren’t all that interested; I was very idealistic, maybe I didn’t choose the right strategies. Sometimes all it takes is one powerful local figure who badmouths you and turns part of the community against your efforts... I learned a lot and eventually moved the project from the former village school – a single-room schoolhouse and the local teacher’s office – up to our attic, where the exhibitions were visited by many locals and people from other villages, from Polička and larger nearby towns, weekend-cottage owners, artists. One exhibiting artist, thanks to a tip from me, found an abandoned church in nearby Jimramov, where he now lives and has also started organizing cultural events, concerts, exhibitions and so on (Jakub Tomáš Orel). Or the Přespolní association from nearby Lubná, who look after the use of abandoned village buildings. Perhaps we all have the potential to be artists – it’s the gift of creativity and its development, shedding fears, a path to freedom. But not everyone can do it at the highest level – it’s about perseverance, and above all about obsession and a genuine inner need to express yourself and communicate this way. Art schools today produce large numbers of artists, and many of them are excellent, I think, but the percentage who stick with art isn’t all that high. The world, however, is big, and today it’s much easier to stay connected – to go elsewhere, to seek opportunity and a foothold in art centres like London, Berlin, New York, Paris and beyond... The world is interested in new, long-overlooked regions – Africa, for instance... We’re closer to each other and more aware of what’s happening thanks to social networks (those treacherous waters). I think the world is brimming with creativity – when I scroll through it all, I find a great deal of resonance with what I’m feeling right now. The language of art keeps growing, transforming; it’s alive and absorbs everything around it. Once the floodgates of creativity open – often blocked by someone who told you that you weren’t good enough – you can channel that energy into any field, not just art.

Children have always fascinated me with their spontaneity, their boundless energy, their games that spring from nothing. They’re natural performers, philosophers, scientists – joyful, pure beings who, like all of us, gradually lose that beauty as life wears them down. One of my earliest exhibitions was Róza extáze, born of my enchantment with watching my niece Róza and her dancing and playfulness. It became a series of photographs, once shown at the Velryba gallery on Opatovická Street in central Prague (the gallery is still there, but I rarely have time to visit anymore). I was inspired by Osho’s ideas, his book On Children, recordings of his talks on the subject. The idea that children thrive best when they are allowed to discover the world without interference from educators, or even parents, when they are given space and time – I think the grounds of our homestead were ideal for that... When I had the stamina, I could afford them this luxury. Unfortunately, later on, as everywhere else, we caved in under the pressure of the school environment where everyone already had a phone. The school even required children to have smartphones for IT classes. Kids want to chat and play games together, because out here in the village they don’t have peers their age, and so on. The children have taught us a great deal and still do – above all patience. Now I may be on my own with it, so I really don’t know how it will turn out, but they’re basically what’s keeping me above water right now. They’re positive and talented, they play the violin and piano, they get good marks, and I’m happy I have them. We’re all still learning in the school of life. I think the role of parents and teachers is somewhat overrated – for me, classmates were always more important.

My son Hugo plays games where he learns to trade and barter, and I think he’s got it in him. Johanka, at the first festival we took her to – it was held in a drained swimming pool before the season opened – had a bracelet from me, and she spontaneously started engaging with people, trading the bracelet for other things, trying them out and then swapping them back. She was about two; it was very cute and we could see she’d manage just fine in the world. I can ask for a fair price for my work. Some things I hold on to and store for years and years before I part with them... My collection of drawings, for instance, feels more intimate to me than my photographs, and I’m reluctant to sell. I started selling a bit more a few years ago, during Covid. I tell myself that collectors probably think something like: “She held out a long time, she’s ageing.” I’ve left some mark, so I suppose it makes sense to them now... I don’t know how it works exactly – apparently people started collecting the nineties generation because they’d already had enough of the eighties. In the past I would sell something to an institution once every few years; smaller collectors buy from me only occasionally. There are probably just a handful of major collectors in the Czech Republic, but I don’t really know much about that world. I haven’t had great experiences with auctions, but sometimes when I’m in a tight spot I consign something, or if I want to support a cause.

My biggest sale so far went through with support from several parties, into the GASK collection. It was an iconic piece that represented the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale in 1999. The National Gallery has had one single work of mine for about thirty years – I believe it was donated by the collector Jelínek, who bought from young artists in the mid-nineties... GHMP has the most, but it was often an exchange in support of an exhibition or the production of a catalogue. MuMoK, for instance, has a large photograph of mine from the Views series. They had it in a show and I didn’t even know it was there. I ran into someone on the street who congratulated me on being in an exhibition in Vienna and in their collection – but it had been donated by a divorcing private couple to whom my former Viennese gallerist had sold it long ago...

During the 1990s we had an LLC. I’ve already mentioned that... Then I started teaching and somehow enjoyed learning how to teach – I still do, even though financially it really is mainly a hobby. There were moments when I borrowed money from friends, but I always managed to pay it back somehow.

I exhibit quite actively; I enjoy it and it motivates me. I’ve been asking for fees since I had children. They’re usually symbolic, sometimes non-existent, which I don’t understand – even I, with our small association-run Kabinet Chaos Gallery in the countryside, tried to pay artists out of grants, so I don’t see why it can’t work elsewhere. As for the J&T Banka art ranking (an annual index of the Czech art market) – I have some reservations. I’m not sure it can be considered objective when it’s run by a private gallerist, a magazine and a bank that has been acquiring works from the top-ranked artists. They say that not being listed or not ranking high doesn’t mean an artist lacks quality. But whether they like it or not, the artists near the top may have an easier time with commercial success – and supposedly it’s not about selling more but about how often and at which institutions you exhibit. I’ve been ranking higher in recent years, even though I’ve been exhibiting at roughly the same intensity since the nineties, but I’ve been selling more since I started moving from around 70th up to about 20th place. I’ve noticed that I’m often approached when a new gallery opens – my name is familiar and useful to them, and hopefully my work too. Most recently Automatické mlýny – the Gočár Gallery – invited me to create a large-scale installation on a huge wall, with the idea of acquiring these wall-based works for their collection. Then they discovered that in this mega-expensive renovated mill they didn’t have enough storage space – I found that genuinely funny. Sometimes I think I should sell everything just to make room for something else, like a darkroom. Or a space for darkness therapy.

You can work with anything. I still commute once a week – I’ve been teaching at Anglo-American University for ten years now, running my Cross Media Art Studio, a set of several courses where I combine elements of art therapy and guide students towards both art and self-discovery.

Instagram is a fairly natural tool for me, but somehow I can’t bring myself to post only art. It’s my little art-and-life magazine where I share stories: #villagelife #sisterhood #villageculture #Prahaha #Kidsplay and more. Unfortunately I somehow missed the payment deadline and they deleted my website. I need someone to help me with that. I’ve been working on a book called Autobiograf for ten years; my friend, the artist, photographer and graphic designer Markéta Othová, is now helping me with the layout. I’d like to have the website ready by the time the book comes out, visually coordinated, because honestly not much fits into a book and I’d like to include a QR link to the site. My work is quite varied – maybe that’s some kind of condition too, looking at it from a distance, but I’m more of a hyperactive type who gets bored doing something I already know works. I keep searching for new means of expression, and from photography – or somehow shifted photography, since I experimented with that medium – I keep trying all sorts of things. Lately I’ve been leaning more towards materials, colours, drawing-painting-printing – or whatever it is – incorporating natural matrices... I like working fast, in action. With children and a homestead to run, I don’t have much time... But that action-oriented, performative quality – a kind of working from the here and now – really appeals to me; it’s essentially a performance in itself... You know how it is. I just remembered how you used to drag canvases through nature.

Follow your own path, wherever it takes you. Follow your heart and intuition – using your brain doesn’t rule that out. In balance, you can walk even a tightrope with joy and a smile. Don’t be afraid to push your limits; be honest and sincere in what you do. You probably can’t avoid glancing left and right, but always try to return to yourself and your own feelings and insights. Don’t be discouraged or intimidated. Keep learning – there are many teachers, directions, possibilities. Every new experience, good or bad, will move you forward on your journey. And the journey in art is endless... It’s a lifelong conversation with yourself and with the world through the works you create. It’s good to finish something before you move on. Read, nourish your soul, exercise your mind, pay attention to your body, experiment in art, try working with different materials and techniques. Craft is flourishing right now – well, you have it all ahead of you, and that’s beautiful!