The Biennale Ve věci umění / Matter of Art 2020 (VVUMOA) will be held in Prague from 22 July to 15 November 2020, and highlights the themes of care, empathy, intimacy in relation to divisions existing across race, culture, class, and gender. The project, organised by the initiative for contemporary art tranzit.cz in cooperation with the Prague City Gallery, comprises the international exhibition entitled Come Closer, curated by Tereza Stejskalová and Vít Havránek, who are also editors of Come Closer: The Biennale Reader – a book published concurrently with the biennale and distributed internationally by Sternberg Press. This reader will be the latest addition to the prolific publishing output of tranzit.cz, which includes Czech translations of books by Didier Eribon, Carla Lonzi, Chris Kraus, Nicolas Bourriaud, Bruno Latour, Slavoj Žižek and Frantz Fanon. In order to promote the accessibility of art in general, all venues of the biennale have wheelchair access, and free admission applies to the exhibition as well as to all the events presented as a part of the extended live and community programme.
Featured among the 40 participating artists are Candice Breitz, Karol Radziszewski, Sung Tieu, Róbert Gabriš, Taring Padi, Anna Kravets, Alina Kopytsa, Tuan Mami, Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Eric Baudelaire, Lucy Beech, Alžběta Bačíková, Otty Widasari & Hafiz, Jiří Žák and the Institute of Anxiety. Nearly a dozen of the artists were commissioned to produce new artworks for the biennale. The list of authors who contributed to the reader includes Jérôme Bazin, Heather Berg, Eva Koťátková, Jiří Skála, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Simone Wille and others.
