Tereza Havlovicová is mainly engaged in pedagogical, curatorial and teaching activities. She graduated in Curating Study at the Faculty of Art and Design of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. She obtained her second master’s degree in Art and Education at the Department of Art Culture of the Faculty of Education there, and as part of this study she completed a study internship in Finland at the Faculty of Art and Design at Aalto University in Helsinki, in Art Education. Several years she worked in the education department of the Kampa Museum in Prague, and since 2018 she has been a member of the lecturers team of the DOX Center for Contemporary Art. Between 2015 and 2018, she worked in the hunt kastner gallery as an intern and exhibitions production. Since 2016, he has been working at the Faculty of Education as a teacher at the Department of Art Education. As part of her dissertation project, she focuses on the topic of art-educational programs taking place in galleries and museums of contemporary art in the Czech Republic, focusing on the possibilities of determining their quality.
Quality Issues of Selected Online Educational Programmes of Czech Galleries During the State of Emergency from March 2020
Given the current situation associated with the worldwide spread of COVID-19, we encounter a number of activities of the education departments that are presented in the online space. However, as gallery education is based on personal encounters with the original artwork, it is not easy to quickly flip all activities to the Internet in a meaningful way. This does not concern only educational programmes, but those that contain a reflexive component and the participants of which become active researchers in cultural events as well. The desire of galleries to be “seen” and to say that they are still active can fundamentally harm the programme if it exceeds the quality requirement. In these conditions, is it better to publish a bad programme than to publish none? Or will the current online situation more clearly reveal gaps in the understanding of quality within the education departments that we would not otherwise have known? In March I have tried such an activity myself. I created a four-part series of educational videos for the DOX Center for Contemporary Art, mediating the exhibition of the artist Jiří David called I Am Here. So far, the first volume has been published, with the remaining three now undergoing postproduction. However, these videos were originally intended for a certain child visitor from the DOX hobby group who knows both me and the exhibition and has already seen the artworks personally. I perceive my project critically and now find a number of mistakes that I will show in my presentation. My experience with this project allowed me to look into the process which is very demanding for many galleries not only in terms of finance and production, but especially in terms of expertise. As part of my presentation, I will introduce several selected programmes that have been published in the Czech online space, and will focus on their quality. I will start with conceptual analysis of the programmes, working with terms such as exemplification, denotation, expression, alteration, medium, inter-subjectivity, context, co-text, visual literacy, and others. I will briefly summarize what conditions a quality gallery education programme should meet and determine which of the presented programmes is of better quality and why.