“The hardest part was getting the people, that was a superhuman task, so they wouldn’t be too wasted from all the parties.”
That’s how visual artist David Černý, author of a controversial sculpture Entropa and the “babies” on Žižkov TV tower, remembers a Sunday morning 20 years ago. It was then that the then 23-year-old art student and a group of friends repainted a Soviet tank in hot pink and erected a gigantic middle finger on it.
Once a memorial of the liberation by the Red Army, then a symbol of the end of the Soviet occupation and finally an exhibit in a military museum in Lešany, the “pink tank” is once again in the scope of the media. It has become a part of the “Week of Freedom,” conceived by Opona, a local organization.
The tank has been placed on a pontoon in the middle of Vltava in downtown Prague for the duration of the event. For the Defense Minister Alexandr Vondra (Civic Democrats, ODS), the tank is a reminder of the fact that freedom is something that needs to be fought for continually. Černý expressed his concerns for Czech Position: “A state, which has started to sellout to Russia ... it seems like a marginal problem, but it isn’t.”
The pink tank can be seen during United Islands, a free international music festival of which Czech Position is a media partner, held June 23–25 on islands in the Vltava river.
See related article: David Černý’s ‘pink tank’ returning to Prague center
“Then, the Russians were here percieved as unwelcome, and the whole society realized that,” says artist David Černý, adding, “Today, they are here, and seemingly, nobody minds.”
