Countries of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the Baltics and the Caucasus succeeded at the Prague Quadrennial 2023

Prague Quadrennial awarded exhibitions & projects presented during its 2023 edition in sections Countries and Regions and the Student exhibitions. This time, the main reflected theme of the event, that took place in Prague from 8^th until 18^th June 2023, was “RARE”. Some of the participants from countries involved in/related to the PACE network were also among the winners.

The Czech Republic received the award for the Best Concept in the Exhibition of Countries and Regions for the Limbo Hardware project. The project is a disturbing reflection of an atomised world consisting of a plethora of parallel truths and alternative realities. It relativises not only the limited spectrum of our rational thought, but also our perception of space and physical distance.
The same exhibition also received the Volkswagen Award for the Most Sustainable Exhibition.

Most Imaginative Concept in the Student Exhibition award was given to Serbia for their Daydreaming – through a complex process of collaborative creation, participating Serbian students have designed a work in the field of scene design that deals with the theme of dreams and tenderness, connecting the space of dreams with the space of reality.

Serbia was also given the award in the section Community Activation in the Exhibition of Countries and Regions in which the jury gave the prize to the project the Moonshine Piano. The Serbian exhibition represents a multi-layered ‘storytelling machine’, in which prominent representatives of contemporary performance space and scene design in the theatre (and non-theatre) world in Serbia are involved in the development of new narratives based on specific artefacts.

The award Best Design in the Exhibition of Countries and Regions received Hungary and the work winterreise.box. The jury appreciated “the tension of music, space, and performance, the design [that] creates a desperate existential metaphor. The strengths of the exhibit are the raw performance, the alienated cell and its contents, and the videos that allow the viewers to revisit the performance.”

Best Performance in the Student Exhibition was given to Estonia who presented the performance titled Lab of Figurative Thought: You Have Only a Moment. The aim of the project is to create functioning artistic compositions in front of the spectators, while at the same time carrying out a creative research into the collective memory of tastes, most of which are unknown and unconscious.

Georgia was successful in the section Visionary Teamwork in the Student Exhibition. About their work The Box, the jury wrote: “In a world that is out of joint, the creation of space for communal participation and conversation in and around deconstruction, remaking, reshaping and repurposing real objects and thought, becomes an invincible connecting thread between the participants. ‘The Box’ embodies visionary teamwork.”

Neighboring Armenia’s I see, I cannot see succeeded in the section Responsiveness to Urgencies in the Exhibition of Countries and Regions. In the words of the jury: “This award recognizes the use of theatre skills including but not limited to collaboration, care and resilience demonstrated by artists in a dramatically changing world. This quietly powerful exhibit shows us what is possible when theatre artists work together.”

The Responsiveness to Urgencies in the Student Exhibition award was given to Poland and their work Asylum. This project examines a situation after the outbreak of full-scale aggression against Ukraine, when a new sense of threat and lack of control has become a dominant aspect of Polish life, with daily reports of war causing constant anxiety.