Portrait of a Music Festival is a visual map of an event that took place in the summer of 1976 at Pezinok in western Slovakia. The exhibition consists of thirty-two large-format photographs taken from Jaroslav Prokop’s graduation portfolio from Prague Film Academy (FAMU).

It is divided into four thematic cycles entitled Audience, Musicians, Backstage, and Night, covering the ‘private’ as well as the ‘public’ side of what was for those days a rather unusual musical event (officially and unimaginatively named the ‘Concert of Youth’) and allowing us to view it from different but interlinked viewpoints.

Prokop’s monumental formats, coupled with his low-tech presentation, help create a sense of authenticity and bring the past vividly to life. The explanatory captions, often overlapping the images, enable us to identify individuals who later became key players in Czechoslovak non-consumer culture, as well as those who, from today’s perspective, played only a marginal role.

Jaroslav Prokop lets us relive those events of 41 years ago. If we seek to understand the past by revisiting our youth, we may find the present less surprising and the future less perplexing. And of course this also applies, in a slightly modified way, to those of us who do not yet have anywhere to go back to…

Karel Haloun a Luděk Kubík
exhibition curators

More about Jaroslav Prokop: Portrait of a Music Festival or else Pezinok 1976 Event www