Alena Kotzmannová 

These photographs were commissioned by the curator Katarzyna Uszynska and were taken in a Rudolfinum office. The room is located on the first floor in the west central section of the building facing the Vltava river and the Prague Castle. Rudolfinum was built as a gallery and music hall in 1885 in the Neo-Renaissance style typical for representative public buildings in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During the Nazi occupation, the Reich Protector (Reichsprotektor) of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich, president of the Wannsee Conference in 1942 (which ensured the implementation of the so-called Final solution to the Jewish question) and whose father was a composer and music lover, decided to set up his office in Rudolfinum in order to be as close to the rehearsals and classical concerts as possible. One of the staged photographs depicts a thirty-years-old collage (Die Zeit IV., 1988) with a portrait of Heydrich erected on the sheet music stand. The portrait’s author is the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, who reflected the Nazi violence and Belgian cruelty during the colonial period in Congo.

Since 1994, the office has served the director of Galerie Rudolfinum, the “kunsthalle” for modern and contemporary art and is filled with a large number of books, encyclopaedias, exhibition catalogues and unrealized exhibition proposals.