ŠperkStret 2016

„For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events.“
Michel Foucault – L´Archeologie du savoir

The theme of the contemporary jewellery conference Šperkstret 2016 is Collection. The incentive to the conference subject were two key exhibitions of contemporary jewellery collections in 2015 - "Kinetic Jewellery" - annual exhibition of the Slovak jewellerer Anton Cepka in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and the collection of Heidi and Karl Bollman in MAK, Vienna. The difference between both exhibitions lay not only in the exhibited artifacts, but also in the art collectors, their motivations, criteria of collecting and how the collections were presented today´s viewer. Therefore we ask and seek answers to questions: What is the significance collections for the current state of the art, especially jewelery design? Who becomes a collector of contemporary jewellery and what is his/her motivation? Is jewellery collection memory of its period? What does the collection, collecting mean in context of jewellery and what possitions represent institutions as art collector?

Disturbing questions, where is the author jewellery heading and how does it reflect the present day, remained hanging in the air. In the spirit of the crisis in which we have found ourselves, do collections serve as clues? We turn to the past, because we can not be sure of the future? Are collections merely sentimental whim, commodity of rising value, remembrance of the time, lost assurances, or is collecting essential human characteristic, which has its origin in the need to tell stories?

The theme Collection opens many levels of thinking about the subject, whether from the point of view of the collector, creator, theoretician, historian, gallerist or general viewer. Our concern is to stimulate discussion focused on contemporary jewellery as a whole, to turn the attention of the general public back to the artistic medium of jewellery and seek answers to the outlined questions concerning collecting, collection and jewellery memories.