Photo: Glenn Kates, Radio Free Europe.
Earlier this week reports on Russian state television and the country’s Channel Five station heaped praise on a photography exhibition at what they dubbed “one of the most famous art galleries in Prague,” one “well-known” in the art world. Allegedly, this major gallery had just opened a show of photos of the aftermath of a fire at the Trade Union building in Odesa, Ukraine, on May 2 that left more than 40 dead, many of them supporters of Russia. The exhibition’s organizers claimed that showing the photos at the prestigious gallery was their “attempt to overcome the conspiracy of European media silence on what is happening in Ukraine.”
However, as Radio Free Europe discovered, the report never mentions the name of this well-known gallery, because it’s not actually a gallery. The photos are hanging in a hallway on the fifth floor of a Prague office building that houses the headquarters of the Czech national Communist party, formally known as the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia. Though the Russian TV reports showed a crowded gallery opening, when Radio Free Europe dropped by, “the hall was empty aside from two elderly members of the Communist-linked “Czech Borderlands Club” lounging in armchairs lining the walls.”
Not only is the gallery a fraud, but so is the photography exhibition, which features computer print-outs of pixelated photos culled from the Internet.
Watch the Russian TV report about a show at “one of the most famous art galleries in Prague” below:
