THE FALL FESTIVAL? EMPATHY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
Unexpected connections. Stories. Discoveries. Sharing. The FALL festival at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art is a space for the thoughts and voices of writers, artists, and other creative individuals of various genres and their inspiring “borderlands”. In the digital age, a time when we share more on social media than in the real world, the festival is a chance to slow down, to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and to step for a moment into the stories of others. To ask if creativity, imagination, and empathy are what (for now) set us apart from our artificially intelligent future. Discussions, readings, guided tours of exhibitions, and interdisciplinary workshops. This is FALL.
AN AIRSHIP BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
The home of the FALL festival is the Gulliver Airship, which soars above the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. Its origin is a story of creative freedom, the courage to take risks, and the conviction of its creators – DOX founder Leoš Válka and architect Martin Rajniš – that even in today’s accelerated world, things can be done differently. That dreams can come true. The Gulliver Airship is hard to describe in concrete terms and easily labelled categories. It is a place of imagination and fantasy. A place where time flows differently, where the surface velocity of our lives can be slowed down. A place between heaven and earth, between dream and reality, between art and literature. It is a place of stories – of telling them and sharing them.
DOX. MUSEUM ON A MISSION
The DOX Centre for Contemporary Art was established thanks to a private initiative that transformed a former factory in Prague’s Holešovice neighbourhood. It is the largest non-governmental, non-profit institution dedicated to contemporary art in the Czech Republic. Since 2008 its mission has been to create an environment for the exploration, discussion, and artistic presentation of important social issues, with visual art, literature, music, theatre, and other disciplines allowing a critical approach to the so-called reality of the world today. The exhibition space of over three thousand square metres is complemented by the DOX+ Multifunctional Hall, the Gulliver Airship, the Archive of Fine Arts, the Bendox bookstore, and the design shop DOX by Qubus.
