Honorabiles, esteemed Vice-Deans,
dear graduates, distinguished guests,

We meet today to bring a significant chapter to a ceremonial close: your Master’s studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Brno University of Technology.

Today is an occasion for gratitude and for looking back. I stand here for the eighth time, and for the last time as dean. Endings have one peculiar property. When we look back, the past appears more ordered and more coherent than it ever was in the present tense of action. What we have lived through together over these six years now reads as an intelligible story, even though these were years in which most things, and most certainties, were changing surprisingly, chaotically, and fast.

Your studies were marked by transformations reaching far beyond the buildings of our faculty. Society-wide upheavals such as the pandemic, wars, and the climate crisis intertwined with the development of your work and of our institution. Yet alongside them came deeper shifts, and it is your generation that has left the faculty more profoundly changed than any generation before you did. Through your efforts, your sensitivity, and your courage, the school kept finding a new shape and became more clearly aware of the boundaries of its shared responsibility.

I say this again today because you are entering a world that is openly unstable, and there is no reason to soften that. A world in which the certainties my generation took for granted are falling apart. A world shaped by a politics of polarisation, narcissism, opacity, and gesture; a politics that scorns solidarity, mocks those who are different or weaker, and treats power and dominance as a value. It would be convenient to claim that none of this concerns us – us, at a faculty of fine arts.

Here I want to be confrontational, with myself as much as with all of us. In recent years, the pressure has been growing to keep education, as it is often put, “apolitical”. Yet feigned apoliticism and the neutrality of the institution as a whole are two different things. The latter protects the freedom to take a stand; the former gives it up. To teach means taking positions on what matters, and explaining them. Feigned apoliticism is just a way of dodging responsibility. I hope that is the one thing you have not learned here.

In such times, art is, more than ever, a space where agreement and disagreement can be articulated; where one can stay silent, speak softly, or scream; where a language is being born for what we cannot yet say in words. Your work, and the way you defend it, shows me that you are a generation capable of speaking in the voices of those who lack the opportunity, the space, or the courage to speak for themselves. It shows me that you are aware of how our existence is bound up with the existence of others; that you have a distinctive kind of sensitivity and a capacity for concentration; and that you grasp the essence of collaboration, and of an immediacy you know how to pass on to those around you.

For this, I want to thank you personally. My thanks also go to the academic staff and to all who sustain our school behind the scenes, for their commitment, knowledge, skills, and patience. And I thank your loved ones for their support and affection, and for believing in your dreams.

Even after your studies have ended, may you never lose the courage to ask yourselves the essential questions. And in whatever form your work may take, may you always carry the trace of authenticity you developed here. May you never lose the ability to perceive, and to live, a world worth sharing. Sharing it with everyone. It is a wealth that cannot be appropriated by a chosen few.

This brings me back to what I mentioned at the beginning: the distortion of the backward glance, the effect known as hindsight bias. I do not see it as a bad thing. For me, it belongs to a world of trust and resolve, where one must believe that what makes sense at the beginning still makes sense at the very end. It is good that we are not afraid of it, and that we feel the need to ask, along with the poets of small observations: “Why change the slope of a path that leads from the bottom all the way to the summit, when we have neither the time nor the strength to travel it whole?”

Filip Cenek